There was a time when only lightweight operating systems were available for ARM devices like Raspberry Pi. Why? Because earlier ARM devices had low end hardware with limited RAM and CPU.
It all changed when Raspberry Pi 4 targeted desktop users with its 8 GB variant and doubled down on it with the introduction of Raspberry Pi 400.
This resulted in bringing the support of mainstream desktop Linux distributions to Raspberry Pi. Thanks to that, you can now install Ubuntu desktop on Raspberry Pi.
Since Ubuntu desktop now supports ARM devices, other Ubuntu-based distros should join the ARM bandwagon soon. And it seems Pop!_OS is ready to board it.
Pop OS coming soon on Raspberry Pi!
System76’s Principal Engineer and maintainer of Pop!_OS, Jeremy Soller shared a teaser photo on Twitter recently. The image is basically a screenshot of Neofetch running in terminal.
If you look closely, you can see that some details that indicate that it is running on a Raspberry Pi device.
The host name indicates Raspberry Pi and so does the BCM2835 CPU (chip used on Raspberry Pi devices). You can also notice the aarch64 in the OS name.
In addition to that, Jeremy also shared a repository link that contains Pop OS packages for ARM devices. Here’s the link.
How soon?
There is no other information available from Systm76 on this front. But if I have to make a guess, I would say that the upcoming Pop!_OS 21.10 version will have an ARM version for Raspberry Pi like devices.
This is not a blind guess. The ARM repository link shared by Jeremy clearly mentions ‘impish’ in its directory structure. Impish Indri is the codename for the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 slated for release on 14th October.
Pop!_OS 21.10 follows the release of Ubuntu 21.10 and should be released soon afterwards. All this gives us enough clue to surmise that Pop!_OS is coming to Raspberry Pi devices this month.
This is indeed a good thing because Pop!_OS is popular among developers. This could mean more developers using Raspberry Pi as their development environment.
I am delighted to see this development. How about you?
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