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Comment by piperswe | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what distro you're using where there are missing packages. I've never run across missing distro packages on arm64 Debian (which I regularly use at work).

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Ubuntu server itself is pretty arm friendly. But there's a LOT of software that doesn't come with the distro's packaging that one might want to run in the cloud. Docker images and vendor hosted package repos. Everyone does this for x86. Very few do it for ARM. And if you want to try to build-from-source, the dependencies of a lot of pieces are often very out of date on ARM.

There is a kind of after market ARM community that occasionally builds these items. But they are generally pretty out of date.

I don't have an issue with the base distro and what it tries to do, but there are so many random pot holes and road blocks that just don't show up for x86.

I have ARM servers running in production now. But I have workloads that aren't reasonable portable to the uArch and I don't force them there.

Have you faced issues with packages being too old on Debian Stable though?

"Missing packages" may be packages missing important features or bugfixes.

I don't think I've ever run into an issue where arm64 packages are older than amd64 packages. Sometimes Debian Stable package versions are old, in which case I use backports, use the company's internal packages (which are often compiled for arm64), or compile it myself. It's no more of an issue on arm64 than on amd64.

I certainly have...

Arch and SUSE are ARM friendly though.

Isn't running Arch in prod considered brave still? Or has it become stable and predictable in the last few years I did not watch it?

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