The Problem to Solve

I, and very few in the world at this point, use Linux systems on arm64 as their daily driver. For myself, it's my M2 Macbook Air. I have another pending project that is using ESP32 dev boards and without the IDE, I would have had to figure out some other way to write firmware to them.

The Solution

Fortunately, the solution here was very simple. The Arduino IDE was built on electron, so my first build was successful! It built out of the box no problem, meaning i just need a arm based runner in github. Then a second issue popped up. For those that don't know, Apple's CPU's in their computers runs on a 16k page size. This is becoming increasingly more common, Google is testing 16k pages on pixel devices, but the majority of the world runs on 4k pages. This leads to many apps failing to launch due to this mismatch. The Asahi Linux solution is to run apps in microvm's. The VM runs a 4k kernel, fixing the mismatch, allowing the software to run. BUT if I can have this IDE run natively, that'd be ideal. Fortunately, again, Electron now has 16k builds. All that was needed from there was a dependency bump and now we have a working Arduino IDE that runs on ARM64, regardless of page size.

Update 9/28/26

Updated Electron and dependencies to support Electron 42. This allows for the IDE to dynamically handle X11 and Wayland environments gracefully without the need for --ozone-platform=x11.