Installation guide for ARM

[danirabbit]

Problem

We don’t currently have installation guide instructions for the ARM images.

Proposal

An installation guide that includes:

• some kind of recommendation for UEFI firmware for raspberry pi devices
• a disclaimer about m series devices only being viable in a VM
• Any other device specific info we have or links to Ubuntu wikis etc
• arm64 iso checksum is missing from the docs #3948

Prior Art (Optional)

No response

[LuminousHustler]

Is the process the same for creating the installation media for a raspberrypi as it would be for an x86 workstation? If so, I'd mention it when working on #3945

(currently blocked by #3947 though)

[danirabbit]

I'm pretty sure creating the install media is the same.

For PinebookPro someone posted in discord about this the other day. It sounds like maybe a newer version of uboot is required

For M series Macs I think we just say use a VM because going through the hoops to try to boot it natively will not result in a useable system

For raspberry pi I think you need a specific firmware but I don't have any other info

I'm not sure if ARM Thinkpads just boot or need something extra

[RMcNeely]

I think if you want to have a working version for the M-Series Macs its going to be very limited just because of what actually works with Asahi Linux. Thats almost certainly something we should document.

[LuminousHustler]

That's a good point about M-Series Macs. We currently don't recommend that users run Elementary OS in a VM at all, but perhaps it's the only solution on a modern Mac? Other than just trying out the OS I wonder if there is actually a use case.

Out of curiousity do we have metrics on how many times the iso was downloaded on a Mac? That would give us some key insights into whether mac users are even using the OS.

[danirabbit]

@LuminousHustler it looks like we didn't set up separate analaytics for architecture but just from OS it's vast majority Windows, followed by Linux, with minority of macOS

https://plausible.io/elementary.io?f=is,goal,Download&period=12mo&keybindHint=L

[andersdan]

Apologize in advance if i have not read and/or understood the issue tracker in github. Just want to give you a heads up for a possible website issue, i do believe all sha256 checksum examples on page "https://elementary.io/docs/installation#choose-operating-system". are for amd64 ISOs for all versions of OS, Windows version seem to refer to the correct image, but still show sha256 for amd64.

After download i get different sha256:
85116d48c406ae7cd60c936050a099d4b8610321273f6f0a694796db4d4e86ba -> "elementaryos-8.1-stable-arm64.20260219.iso"
bda93040d08c05911fb159f8150bf8f4ef2db6567ef6e2acd197cb6f395d3446 -> "elementaryos-8.1-stable-amd64.20260219.iso"