Distro Recommendation

[publiclewdness]

I have a RockPro64 and am looking for a distro recommendation. My two hopes are to find one that supports full disk encryption during install and that allows me to install to an NVME or SATA drive from the installer. Does anything meet those criteria yet ? I am using Manjaro ARM on an SD card in the mean time but miss those two features.

[foresto]

I got Debian Stable working with a bit of fiddling.

At the time, Buster was the current stable release. Since Buster's kernel was too old, I had to manually configure my installation to pull the kernel from (prerelease) Bullseye using apt pinning, but now that Bullseye is the current release, that's probably unnecessary.

I also had to do some manual work to get a working bootloader, as described here. It's possible that the latest installer version knows how to install a bootloader for the RockPro64 by now. I saw some of the components already in place when I did this last year, but I haven't gone back to check on it.

I've upgraded to Bullseye since then, using Debian's standard upgrade procedure. The system works well, except that the ethernet device sometimes fails to come up after a reboot. That can be fixed either by reloading the dwmac_rk kernel module via serial console, or sometimes just by rebooting again. This might be a problem in the upstream kernel / device tree. It's a headless machine, so I don't know how well video output works.

The system drive is a spinning disk encrypted with LUKS. The bootloader and initrd are on an unencrypted SD card. The ramdisk loads dropbear during boot, so I can enter the LUKS passphrase either via SSH or at the serial console.

[TRS-80]

I do not know about your specific criteria (only because I did not look, they may or may not be supported).

However in general you cannot go wrong with Armbian. It's basically 'Debian (or Ubuntu) for SBCs' (i.e., less fiddling about with bootloaders, kernels, patches, etc). They handle all the low level stuff and user space is vanilla Debian (or Ubuntu). They are very far ahead of most other SBC distros, and especially upstream vanilla Debian (at least on SBCs, anyway).

Armbian makes a very good (and generally reliable) base to start from. Which I think might give you the best shot at getting those other things working.

Edit: for the NVME/SATA check out armbian-config.