Armbian 23.05 Releases with Debian 12 “Bookworm”-Based Images, i3 Support

This release removes the unnecessary Ubuntu Pro ads from the Ubuntu-based desktop images.
Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
Armbian 23.05

The Armbian community informs us today about the general availability of the Armbian 23.05 (codename Suni) operating system for ARM and RISC-V single-board computers, as well as other platforms.

Coming three months after Armbian 23.02, the Armbian 23.05 release is the first to be created on a completely refactored build framework and based on the soon-to-be-released Debian 12 “Bookworm” operating system series, providing users with some of the latest features and updates from the Debian GNU/Linux community, such as the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series.

“The new framework has been in development for around 3 years, during which we combined our decades-long experience with Linux and embedded systems with the latest technologies that have emerged in recent years. We’ve taken all that knowledge and expertise to create something truly exceptional for our users and the Linux community at large,” said the devs.

This release also brings support for the i3 tiling window manager, which is now Armbian’s fourth officially supported graphical environment, updates the Ubuntu-based desktop images for x86 computers by removing unnecessary “Ubuntu Advantage” services and removing web browsers in the Snap format.

Of course, there are many other improvements in the Armbian 23.05 release, such as updated armbian-installer, armbian-config, and armbian-firstrun in-house built tools for a smoother experience when installing and configuring Armbian, more streamlined and consistent packages across different underlying package bases and desktop choices, as well as the latest security patches.

Hardware-wise, Armbian 23.05 adds support for the most recent memory chips on the Banana Pi BPI-M5 single-board computer, rebases the Raspberry Pi, Odroid M1, UEFI, and mvebu edge kernels on Linux 6.2, adds support for the NanoPi R6S / R6C open-sourced mini IoT gateway devices, rebases the Rockchip 32-bit edge kernel on Linux 6.3, and enables support for the FriendlyElec NanoPi R4SE mini router.

For more details about the changes included in this release, check out the announcement page. Meanwhile, you can download Armbian 23.05 images for your hardware right now from the official website.

Last updated 11 months ago

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