Hi all

My RPI 4 is actually working fine with Slackware 15.0 32 bits.

I have the principal applications I use working on it : VLC, Firefox, Chromium , LibreOffice and so on .

The only little problem is that they are a bit slow.

So I think that the RPI4 is running more rapidly on 64 bits and I plan to test the AArch64 version of Slackware ARM.

But are all the applications I have quoted below running well in AArch64 architecture and is this version usable for a stable use ?

Thanks by advance for your answers

Slackware only ships Firefox out of those apps listed. If you setup flatpak on your system, the rest are easily available for you there. No one is really maintaining a repo for arm/aarch64 yet (I'm in planning to do just that eventually) I do have a native libreoffice 7.4.2 build on a repo but I haven't had the time to do builds for the latest 7.4.4.

https://slackware.lngn.net/pub/aarch...rch64-current/ if you want to look around, there is repos for Cinnamon (Willy's csb), my own Gnome 42 builds, and libreoffice in there as of now. (and the asahi dir is kernels for Apple Silicon machines... you don't want them on your rpi4).

If you make the jump to aarch64 I can't say the rpi4 will perform better, but that may very well be the case. I've never seen how they perform but staying on 32bit is a dead end, aarch64-current is the future!

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See the note at the head of the Installation guide.
I have so far made it work on the model of RPi4 that I have in the test lab:

But there's no guarantee that it'll continue to work reliably. If for example the RPi support is unstable in the next Kernel release, and I want to move forwards with the other Hardware Models, I have to send a notice here that nobody using a RPi upgrades their Kernel until further notice.
But I will do that, so if you're happy with that arrangement then you might want to move to SA64 -current because the OS is generally stable.

With those additional apps though, you may find that they need rebuilding from time to time due to their software library dependencies. At some points the Slackware OS will fail to support stuff that was compiled many months ago (that's not the case with the stable releases though).
However, if someone else is keeping builds of such packages up to date with -current, and you also follow -current then it'd probably work out ok.

As to whether Slackware AArch64 is faster than Slackware ARM 32, maybe some people have some experience to share.

You can just grab another SD card and some storage and give it a go. I think KDE is still broken on the RPi atm though, so you should use XFCE or something else.


Cheers
s.

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