The recent Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release has garnered plenty of praise for its great performance on Intel/AMD hardware, but does the latest version run as well on the ARM-based Raspberry Pi?
I’m pleased to say it does.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for Raspberry Pi is available in both server and desktop builds. Both offer the majority of what’s found in the equivalent 64-bit Intel/AMD version. For desktop users, this means GNOME 46, the latest Linux kernel 6.8, and Mesa 24.0.5 graphics.
However, because Ubuntu’s Raspberry Pi builds are ‘preinstalled images’, they do not include the Flutter-based installer. Instead, user account set-up and configuration is done during the first boot.
Another key difference is that Ubuntu 24.04 for Raspberry Pi is not a no-frills, minimal install. We get the full ‘extended’ software set, which now includes a Thunderbird snap packages and the new Snapshot camera app, out of the box.
Pi-specific changes are present too.
Ubuntu 24.04 now ships with the Pemmican utility preinstalled. This monitors for and notifies users of power issues on the Raspberry Pi 5 (common with non-official power cables). Warnings appear as desktop notifications or in server builds shown in MoTD.
In its release notes for the Ubuntu 24.04 release Ubuntu says web acceleration is now enabled in the Firefox snap for greater performance, and that the WebGL aquarium sample can achieve “smooth 60fps full-screen on a Pi 5 at a resolution of 1080p”.
I found myself unable to hit 60fps during that demo on my installation, (which is fully up-to-date) as the frame rate fluctuated between 45-50fps maximum. Curiously, running the demo in the Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm’s Pi-optimised Firefox version, I did manage to hit a solid 60fps.
Despite the 50fps result not being too terrible, it scraps the high flooring that Ubuntu has seemingly been boasting.
For many, a more critical metric is the performance on YouTube.
To that end, I found that on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the Firefox snap, 1080p video playback was quite exceptional – while not 100% smooth, the dropped frames were neither distracting nor particularly noticeable, especially if one was watching via PIP (picture-in-picture), which I personally always do.
The thing that impresses me about Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on the Raspberry Pi 5 is its nimbleness.
While Ubuntu 23.10 was the first version to support the Pi 5 and ran it well —a real feat given how new the Raspberry Pi 5 was at the time of the Mantic Minotaur‘s release— it didn’t feel as fast, fluid, or finessed as earlier releases did on the Pi 4.
But Ubuntu 24.04 LTS upends that — it feels even faster. Not only on the power powerful Raspberry Pi 5 either but also the older, slower Pi 4. User interacts are immediate, animations are fluid, app startup times are quick, resource usage remains well balanced.
Given that Ubuntu is a heavier OS for a Raspberry Pi than the likes of Raspberry Pi OS (also Debian-based but uses LXQt, no snaps, not as many background processes, etc), that it performs so well is exciting.
Weirdly, the Settings > System reports a blank CPU value – amusing given the Raspberry Pi 4/5 isn’t exactly famous for offering a multitude of processor variants (where as lack of disk capacity info makes sense given a pi can be booted from all sorts).
I am using a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB RAM with the official cooler) so silent I assumed Ubuntu didn’t support it and it wasn’t running), with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS booted from an external USB 3.0 SSD (I have an NVMe board for but no compatible SSD yet).
Performance from a slower medium, such as a microSD card, can impact overall performance. Even when booting from my SanDisk Ultra Luxe (with a read speed of 350MB/s and a write speed of 140MB/s), I experienced occasional seconds-long pauses during disk-heavy operations or when multi-tasking rapidly.
Download Ubuntu 24.04 Raspberry Pi
The 32-bit (armhf) Ubuntu 24.04 image for the Raspberry Pi is not available for download, only the 64-bit (arm64) version is. According to Ubuntu, armhf continues to be supported as a ‘foreign architecture’, however, as the Pi 5 does not support 32-bit kernels…
Upgrading an existing armhf install to the forthcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release does not appear to be a possibility (as Ubuntu 24.04 upgrades are not enabled yet).