Armbian 23.08 Released With Work-In-Progress ThinkPad X13s Support, New SBCs

Armbian 23.08 is out as the latest quarterly update to this Debian-based Linux distribution optimized for use on Arm single board computers and other devices.

Arguably most interesting with Armbian 23.08 is adding of the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Snapdragon-powered laptop as a work-in-progress board supported by the project. The ThinkPad X13s has been seeing ongoing improvements to the upstream Linux kernel and interest from various open-source projects for being a capable AArch64 laptop, such as for the various open-source emulator projects to run x86_64 binaries on AArch64. The ThinkPad X13s upstream Linux support continues to improve even though the devices run Windows by default. There are already some distributions supporting the Snapdragon-powered X13s while now Armbian is another option for this Lenovo ARM laptop.

Armbian 23.08 also upgrades its Banana Pi CM4 image to using a Linux 6.1 LTS kernel build, support for the Banana Pi M5 with more recent memory chips, adding the Orange Pi Plus single board computer, adding the Radxa CM5 with I/O board, and a variety of other additions. There are also a number of bug fixes like addressing some 32-bit Allwinner setups hanging on boot and Synaptic search being painfully slow.

Downloads and more details on all of the Armbian 23.08 changes via Armbian.com.