I’d love to get an ARM laptop sometime running a Linux distribution. It seems like a perfect fit for a gigging machine that could potentially run through a show without needing to be plugged in.
I have no idea about the state of things on Linux on ARM though. Can Ardour compile on it? And are there any compatible plugins floating around yet? Or is a Mac still the only good option for the moment?
There is even a ARM-Version for download here. You don’t have to compile yourself. I run Ardour with Guitarix on a raspberry pi 4. Do not expect too much, power is a bit limited. But here it woks well.
What ARM laptops are available now? I haven’t looked in quite a while, are they mostly Qualcomm Snapdragon based made for Windows?
Definitely seems that way. Apparently the new Thinkpads with the Snapdragon X Elite chips have good support but are insanely expensive, or the Pinebook Pro with is well supported but very weak specs. Maybe I’ll look into cobbling together a Pi setup after all 
The performance range of ARM CPUs is huge.
Ardour runs fine an an old Raspberry Pi2 and 3, but only since RPi 4b one can reliably use multichannel USB2 soundcards. Ardour itself doesn’t need a lot of CPU so recording/playback of even of 64 channels and more is perfectly fine.
FX processing and low latency however is a different story.
At the other end of the arm64 spectrum is Apple Silicon. One can run Linux on those boxes, and the original dev of asahi Linux regularly compiled and and ran Ardour in record time on various Apple M1/M2/etc machines.
Some commercial vendors provide plugin binaries for Linux/ARM, but choice is limited.
There’s the Pi 500+ that just came out, maybe that’s a valid contender.
CanaKit has a Raspberry Pi 5 “kit” that has an NVME drive. I have yet to attempt using Ardour with it, so I cannot comment on that, but with 16Gb RAM and the drive’s fast disk writing (compared to an SD Micro drive) it is a very good, relatively inexpensive option for a desktop computer. I will give it a try with Ardour and report back, soon.
That would be great to know if you could report back, the more details and any peripheral info would also be greatly appreciated!
I can definitely do that! Is there a utility that I can run to get some great information now, for preliminary fact finders out there? I am Linux literate, but not audio-expert literate.
TBH I’m not sure, I’m Linux literate but know almost nothing about Pi’s… The fact they used microSD and had reportedly terrible latency wasn’t appealing to me but 16Gb of RAM and NVMe storage got my attention… 
Latency isn’t a dealbreaker for me because I always use mixers with hardware monitoring but the ARM64 Plugin support would be a blessing/curse I think… On one hand getting rid of hundreds of Plugins I never used anyway would be liberating but if my short list of desert island Plugins aren’t available in ARM64 that might be a bridge too far…
Is there a database anywhere of what Linux Plugins are compiled for ARM…?
I’m running Ardour on a Raspberry Pi 5 and am quite happy with it. I’ve mounted it inside my 88-key keyboard and it works fine as a stage instrument playing mostly classical music with the sfizz sampler and the Salamander piano samples.
I do recommend Ubuntu 24 Pro because you have an arm64 realtime kernel available. I can hardly understate how important I think it is to run a realtime kernel.
Commercial plugins aren’t available for ARM, so you’re limited to open source (but read on). Sfizz plays a lot (but not all) sfz files, and I use Dexed (a very nice DX-7 emulator) and Yoshimi as my primary synthesizers.
In principle, though, you can get around this limitation thanks to the Gigabit Ethernet link on the Pi. Just run an Ethernet cable to an Intel/AMD laptop running Linux and WINE, then you can run commercial plugins on the laptop and configure the Pi to act more like a traditional embedded controller that just relays MIDI and audio back and forth across the Ethernet link. I say “in principle” because the Pipewire networking plugins are buggy and I’ve never gotten this completely working.
That is useful info, thanks.
Not quite true. pianoteq has Linux/arm binaries, u-he provides some of theirs,… just to mention two. Yet you are right; there are not many.
This is really helpful information, thanks!
I run my stuff through flatpak, and don’t rely on any proprietary plugins at all. Checking on pkgs.org for any flatpaks with “linuxaudio” in the name, it turns up the just about same number of results for aarch64 packages as for x86_64. Quite an amazing result and not at all what I expected. It really does seem viable to get something together. Neural Amp Modeler is in there, Guitarix is in there, the LSP collection is in there - that’s 99% of my needs right there.
Keep in mind that we highly recommend against using flatpak for pro-audio and Ardour in paricular (and not just because of 3rd party plugins).
That’s understandable, I do bear it in mind and I wouldn’t recommend it to others, especially if they are new to audio on Linux or hoping for official support if they run into problems.
My needs are pretty low-stakes at the moment and the flatpak has behaved very reliably, I wouldn’t try to run a sound desk through it that way though, I just use it as a guitar rig for live shows.
Today 8 okt-2025 on the raspberry 4 installed trixie,and that runs fine,ardour 8,12 installed fine.Tested with import and playback using pulsaudio not the alsa and surprise it worked,so improvement.Soon will try it on the pi 5 to.
Now see how the pipewire jack stuff works.
Make sure to use a recent version of pipewire, older pipewire-jack has several known problems.