The best cheapish (sub €100 /€120) mini pc for manjaro arm?

ARM General ARM Discussion
1

Hi everyone,

I am currently running manjaro KDE arm on my Pi 4 4gb from an SSD, and it’s great in many aspects.

But there are two major annoyances for me… That’s browser speed/smoothness/snappiness and general browser video playback.

What arm mini pc or sbc is most suited for manjaro? Or should I ditch arm and go for a x86 machine. I am looking for a cheapish setup for my livingroom.

Overall snappiness in the desktop environment + all common tasks (browsing/in browser and regular media/light gaming etc)…

Thanks in advance!!! :grinning::+1:

2

It sounds to me like you really are looking for an Nvidia Shield.

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3

IMHO I’d say the Khadas VIM 3. The Hard Kernal Odroid N2+ is probably faster, but the M.2 PCIe slot on the VIM 3 is a nice touch.

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4

The pi actually has a good version of Android TV, i am not looking for an Android device.

I want a Manjaro…

But thanks for helping me out!:+1:

5

Awesome tips thanks!

6

I got this one, i have some lag issue with Geforce now (i don’t know why), Steam remote play work fine.
The bad thing : it have an HDMI 1.4 which is limited :no_mouth:

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7

Awesome…:+1::+1::+1::+1:

8

I would say look into the following devices and if you want just Manjaro then best is to flash Mainline uboot with Manjaro image over emmc.

Amlogic S922x Soc’s ( Panfrost GPU support might be available from 5.10)

  1. Beelink GT King Pro - TV Box but have good Manjaro Image maintained by me and currently posting from it.
  2. Khadas Vim3
  3. Odroid N2+ (If you can purchase locally else internaltional shipping is too high)

RK3399 Soc’s ( already have GPU support while VPU will be available in 5.11)
4. Radxa RockPi4C
5. Firefly Station P1
6. Pine64 RockPro64

With these you can easily compare it with Intel Atom mini pc devices. All the boards mentioned have very good Manjaro Arm Image.

If you need it for video playback then you will have to wait for VPU support on Manjaro and for light gaming currently only retro games are working well with Panfrost on RK3399.

Finally it would be best for you to go with X86 mini pc’s, BTW Beelink will be launching some Manjaro Pre-installed Mini Pc’s Like Beelink GTR (High end), Beelink U55, U57 and maybe lower end model too.

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9

Wow amazing answer!

Thanks for pointing me into the right direction, I love my Pi 4 but it seems they chose a difficult chip to work with.

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