I was able to install the latest Armbian/Ubuntu-Resolute 26.8.3 image on my Orange Pi 5 Plus without a lot of fanfare.  It took a bit of hunting around to find the correct process to get the image written to an SD card with the new Armbian Imager and then push that image to my emmc storage after it booted, but it was rather painless otherwise.  It seems to work without any issues on my 2.5GB/10GB network and is acting as my home Jellyfin media server for now.  It was doing that before running Ubuntu 24.04 with a an older 6.1 kernel from the vendor.  Zero complaints with the old setup, but I wanted a newer and better supported kernel build given all the excitement around the AI-enabled hacker juggernaut. 

 

Ok, so now for my question.  The kernel appears to be:

 

Linux orangepi5-plus 6.18.44-current-rockchip64 #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Aug  9 18:25:30 UTC 2026 aarch64 GNU/Linux

 

whereas the current kernel for my X86/Ryzen 9950x ubuntu box running Ubuntu 26.04 is:

 

Linux myhost 7.0.0-30-generic #30-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Jul 31 18:22:54 UTC 2026 x86_64 GNU/Linux

 

I was wondering why the arm64 systems are not moving up to the version 7 kernel.  Not a complaint....just curious.

 

Very happy with how things are working.  Well done by everyone who worked on this!

 

---snip---

 

v26.8.3 for Orange Pi 5 Plus running Armbian Linux 6.18.44-current-rockchip64

 Packages:     Ubuntu stable (resolute)
 IPv4:        (redacted)

 Performance:  

 Load:         1%                Uptime:         13h 57m    
 Memory usage: 10% of 15.43G     
 CPU temp:     39°C                Usage of /:   4% of 229G       

 

Best,

 

2 hours ago, Ritz said:

6.18.44-

6.18.y is an LTS kernel which receives support for fixes over multiple years. This is our current kernel.

If you want something more recent, switch to an edge kernel using armbian-config.

 

2 hours ago, Ritz said:

7.0.0

I will probably never understand why  Ubuntu takes the useless effort to maintain an non-lts kernel over multiple years while its originator Debian got the clue and uses upstream LTS kernels for their releases so both parties the Debian and Linux maintainers can work hand in hand to fix things.

4 hours ago, Werner said:

why

 

My POW. From marketing perspective 7 sells better then 6 and mainstream x86 devices also require little hw related maintainance. More recent kernel generally provides better support for new (mainstream) hardware, which is their primary focus, then 6.18. And its not bleeding - arch - edge level neither. And they look special. IMO its more marketing then technical choice. Most of Linux users don't have perspective that we have. Higher number is better, different versioning even more. And by the end of the day, Ubuntu kernel is patched, its not pure mainline, so its different by default.

 

Armbian provide 7.1.x on UEFI deskop images OOB. Because there this is pretty safe, its just desktop, and it will boot most recent (Intel / AMD) laptops, while with 6.18.y there could be problems.

Ahhh...well that works for me.  Curiosity satisfied. 

 

I've never tried to use this device as a desktop, but it has been working just fine as a small headless server.  Pity that these things are so pricey now...and I thought it was expensive when I bought it (compared to Rpi 4's and 5's) when I bought it 2 years ago.  

 

Best,

 

Edited September 2Sep 2 by Ritz