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Every time you see a SoC just check if Armbian supports it. This is the case here https://www.armbian.com/odroid-hc4/, and if there is Armbian for it you can just use the Armbian sources to build the kernel for any other distro with ARM support. Including Archlinux ARM, NixOS and so on. Once you know enough about u-boot it's very easy to run any distro provided you have a kernel for it.

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Thanks.

But I don't want to build kernels as part of normal operation once it's set up, I want the device to last its expected useful lifetime with just periodic apt updates. This means a LTS distro that ships kernels for the device. Otherwise the setup is fail-open security wise, depending on my constant active tinkering.

Maybe Odroid happen to be exceptionally good and the vendor provided Ubuntu fork is good enough for this, but I don't see an easy way to check their track record over a longer timespan and for devices that are several generations behind their latest and greatest.

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