Introduction§

Combined, AOSC OS and AOSC OS/Retro supports over 10 architectures, and this number is likely to grow in the future. This page aims to provide an overview of AOSC OS and AOSC OS/Retro port specifications and key feature support.

AOSC OS§

AOSC OS, with its numerous ports, aims to provide near-identical desktop experience across the range architectures it supports. Unfortunately, due to differing upstream support, device availability, and maintainer commitment, not all AOSC OS ports are created equal.

For this reason, we classify our ports into three classes. We will take a look at each class and the architectures listed within in detail.

Primary Architectures§

AOSC OS currently lists two architectural port as "Primary Architectures," which comes with a full-featured repository in which ships all packages, unless a certain piece of software is explicitly incompatible (for instance, VirtualBox only supports x86_64).

Here's a brief table describing the AOSC OS Primary Architectures, as well as key feature support.

Secondary Architectures§

The "Secondary Architectures" comprises ports which targets devices with limited performance, software support, and availability. These ports are updated synchronously with the Primary Architectures with a "best effort" commitment - that is, if it takes too long or developers decide that it would take too long to resolve a certain build-time or run-time issue, they might defer certain updates for one of these architectures.

Experimental Architectures§

The "Experimental Architectures" comprises ports which are initiated as experiments, meaning that system releases may not be generated, features may be disabled, and security updates may not be released in a timely fashion. More importantly, these ports may terminate at the maintainers discretion.

AOSC OS/Retro§

Unlike the AOSC OS mainline ports, AOSC OS/Retro ports are considered equal, with the same target feature set. The table below describes the specifications and key feature support for each AOSC OS/Retro port.