RPro Image Suggestions

[jl_678]

Hi all,
 
As an existing owner of Pine64s and a Rock64, I have finally decided to take the plunge with a RockPro64.  It is on its way, and I am pondering OSes.  As I recall, original Pine64 and Rock64 builds were a bit mixed and so I wanted to reach out to ask the experts about the build that I should consider. (I have the most experience with Ubuntu/Armbian, and my use case is a headless Linux server using a minimal distribution.)  My current ideas are:
 
Ubuntu 18.04
Armbian
DietPi
 
What do you folks think of these?  Is one better than the others from a reliability on the RPro standpoint? Is there anything else that I should consider?
 
TIA                   

[dukla2000]

I can't answer your questions as I have no meaningful experience of armbian or dietpi. Certainly I am happy with my installation as per my sig: it runs pretty stable and suitably low resource usage. So Ubuntu minimal is def worth being on your list imho.
I did try recently Manjaro ARM and postmarketOS (from pinebook pro) in a futile attempt to get a v5 kernel. Basically with both I had problems fairly quickly to get the functionality I need and couldn't resolve them so I am still on Ubuntu.

[jl_678]

I can't answer your questions as I have no meaningful experience of armbian or dietpi. Certainly I am happy with my installation as per my sig: it runs pretty stable and suitably low resource usage. So Ubuntu minimal is def worth being on your list imho.
I did try recently Manjaro ARM and postmarketOS (from pinebook pro) in a futile attempt to get a v5 kernel. Basically with both I had problems fairly quickly to get the functionality I need and couldn't resolve them so I am still on Ubuntu.

Thank you.  It sounds like you have had a great experience with Ubuntu.  I will probably start with that unless I hear strong recommendations to go another direction.

[Bullet64]

For headless i would suggest https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-b...m64.img.xz
Debian Buster 10.3 with kernel 5.6. And booting from an PCIe NVMe SSD

[jl_678]

For headless i would suggest https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-b...m64.img.xz
Debian Buster 10.3 with kernel 5.6. And booting from an PCIe NVMe SSD

I would be open to this.  However, I notice that it is clearly stated as a pre-release build with lots of verbiage around stability and testing.  I ran something like this with my Rock64, and encountered trouble upon upgrading that brought the system down. As a result, I was not all that comfortable with stability of pre-release builds.  I take it your experience has been different? Do you upgrade to every pre-release build?