Hi everyone,

I’m currently changing my setup a bit and I’m thinking about firing up my Raspberry Pi 4 again as a home server kind thing. I typically use Arch (BTW) as my go-to linux distro but IIRC arch on the Pi gave me some trouble last time I tried it. Does anyone know how stable arch on Pi is right now? Also, is there a particular reason I should or shouldn’t use the native Raspberry Pi OS?

I know I didn’t write about uses really but that’s because I haven’t figured out what I want to do with it yet… I’ve recently moved my main server (mainly media) to my folks’ house since they got fiber (gotta go fast), but I think it makes sense having some lower profile server running in my own home so I can connect to it remotely.

  • Adcott@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    I’m a huge advocate for Arch on desktop machines, but it’s probably not ideal for a server running on a RPi unless you particularly enjoy babysitting it.

    I used Dietpi in the past but I’ve had best luck recently with the official Pi OS Lite. Hardware support is perfect; any software you may run is likely tested using the official distro so idiosyncratic issues pop up less often; plus general community support is excellent.

    • bronzing@lemmy.fmhy.mlOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I see, this aligns with my previous experience with Arch on Pi. I guess I’ll stick with Pi OS Lite for now. Thanks!

  • ananas@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    RPi uses a lot of software hacks to get its low-cost hardware running. It is certainly doable on other distros, but using anything but the official ones on RPi is asking for trouble, and you better know how to deal with device trees, etc.

    If you want SBC that is more standard-compliant and has better mainline driver support you should look at e.g. Pine64’s SBCs, such as RockPro64.

    • bronzing@lemmy.fmhy.mlOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I reaaaaaaally want to avoid purchasing new hardware, I feel bad enough about buying my Pi before finding out it’s actually not that well suited for my needs at the time (media server.

      • ananas@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I’d recommend going with the vanilla Raspberry Pi OS then. Sure, it’s not as lightweight as one would usually hope from a SBC OS, and it has the usual problems that apt has, but it general, it works. It has the firmware stuff ready, so no hassle with that. It has device trees set up in a generally-usable way from the get go, etc.

        I didn’t go that route myself and spent couple of days trying to get hardware acceleration to work where I wanted with the VideoCore chip, after which I gave up. VideoCore just isn’t that well supported by the general software stacks, but this was a year or so ago, so it might’ve improved.

        Also note that this is all RPi4 specific. Older RPis work quite well.

  • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    My spouse and I both use Arch (we use Arch BTW) on our desktop PC’s. We also have a Pi, an ODroid and now a Dell Optiplex running as a game server. Our media server has DietPi which is an option I would recommend.

    My spouse just tried Arch on the Dell and found it would have done great as a server but more work required to get stuff set up, especially with ensuring dependencies are installed. So he scrapped that idea and went with tried and true DietPi.

    We’ve messed about with a few different flavours of server distros over the years and it’s always come down to what we need the server to do, feature set and ease of use and configuration.

    It’s been a while since we last used RaspiOS but every time we’ve given it a go, it’s never lasted long because it’s always given us problems and just hasn’t suited our needs as well as DietPi has.

  • malockin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I’ve used Arch on an RPi 2 back in the day. It works just fine, and fun to play with. But at the end of the day, you don’t want things changing every day on a server. I’d recommend going with Raspberry Pi OS; it’s relatively light, well maintained, and just works.

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I used Arch ARM on a couple of Pi W, but support ended for them (fair enough), so had to move those over to Raspberry Pi OS to continue using them.

    But, everything else is running Arch… Pi W2, Pi3, and they’re all solid.

  • ducking_donuts@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’m running Arch on my RPI 4b+ and quite happy with it.

    The installation was pretty simple IIRC - I did run into some issue with uboot which was easily solved by searching for the error on the internet.

    Arch Linux ARM ships with a mainline aarch64 kernel and uboot by default, but if you are interested in running the RPI kernel and their boot loader, there’s a custom pacman repo and instruction on the forums: https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16144

    All in all I don’t think arch needs that much maintenance on a non-critical home server - just make sure to check for config updates every now and then and reboot after kernel upgrades.

  • GustavoM@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Armbian. Aside from some minor inconveniences, typical from a Ubloatu install (unsolicited openvpn, cron, network-manager) its a breddy gucci distro.

  • DevoidWisdom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’ve used raspberry pi os and shortly arch arm, both work ok. I remeber having an issue with some python packages on arch arm, but thats it. Personally I chose Debian testing for my headless pi4 and have been happy. It’s running Syncthing, Mariadb, a few python scripts to pull data from pi pico-w. FTP server for IP cameras recording, Pydio, Pihole, and Gitea.