Armbian is an exceptional project, even if the support might be uneven in some places, being able to roll out the same OS across almost every SBC i have is an absolute game changer. If there is support, Armbian is worth trying 100% of the time.
Edit: Also if you don't like/want Ubuntu/Debian their build documentation is pretty great.
I just stumbled across armbian recently and I must say I really like it.
I wanted to use UEFI, but my orangepi cm5 modules don't seem to have the SPI chip needed to store the UEFI there, so I'd have to load it on a partition and lose out on some features like persisting variables across boot.
The arm ecosystem really needs to settle on some sort of universal boot loader / firmware layer and stop just hacking up the linux kernel and not contributing back to it.
I'm not an Arm dev and am just a consumer so I may be misunderstanding, but isn't Arm SystemReady pretty much the thing that's intended to solve the problem you're talking about (among others)?
It is, but it seems like only servers are adopting it at the moment. Or high end ARM workstations. I can't think of any consumer devices or SBC's off the top of my head that support it.
Readit News
Edit: Also if you don't like/want Ubuntu/Debian their build documentation is pretty great.
FWIW: I’m running dietPi on my OG Pi Zero W and it doesn’t even hit 30% resource usage.
I wanted to use UEFI, but my orangepi cm5 modules don't seem to have the SPI chip needed to store the UEFI there, so I'd have to load it on a partition and lose out on some features like persisting variables across boot.
The arm ecosystem really needs to settle on some sort of universal boot loader / firmware layer and stop just hacking up the linux kernel and not contributing back to it.
https://developer.arm.com/documentation/107981/0302/SystemRe...