Hi team,
Just wanted to check in if there’s any update on an ARM build of Bootstrap Studio.
With more people moving to ARM-based systems, it would be great to know if it’s on the roadmap or if there’s any tentative timeline.
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If there is demand, we will work on an arm build. At the moment we have a macOS arm build (Apple Silicon), but not for Windows or Linux. If others would like to see this added, write below.
I’m just curious—if my next laptop is an ARM-based device, don’t Windows ARM PCs use an emulator to run software that isn’t natively supported? Or does Bootstrap Studio simply not work on them?
Yes, Windows on arm uses an emulator to run x86 software, so the current version of Bootstrap Studio will run fine. On Linux I am not sure of the state of this type of emulation. The forum thread is about a native arm builds which don’t go through the emulator.
Chiming in as someone else desperately holding out for an ARM build. I maintain four websites, and since upgrading my machine, I’ve spent weeks searching for a solution that doesn’t require running a full x86 OS VM just for Bootstrap Studio, or continuing to run it on older, slower hardware. Shifting four sites to a new editor would be incredibly time-consuming and painful, from a business perspective.
Here are the things I’ve tried, on the emulation side. These results are the same whether running the AppImage itself or using the --appimage-extract-and-run flag. (Ubuntu 25.04 plucky):
- Box64: Technically runs, but within minutes, it begins eating through memory (20+GB on 32GB RAM) with cpu temp spikes like I just launched a 4k game at 60fps
- Distrobox with the qemu-user-static option for cross-architecture compatibility: Can’t get it to launch. Just a series of stop-and-go errors that remind me of the early wild west days of WINE config. Tried with both Arch Linux and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed builds via podman
- FEX: Honorable mention only; dismal results
From playing with the appimage tooling, I do wonder if an ARM build would be as simple as building the appimage with the --arm_aarch64 flag enabled? Either way, I believe there should be enough users here happy to play with a beta build.
I’d also like to note it’s difficult to measure demand for ARM, based on conversations here. Many here are existing users hoping to bring it to new hardware. It’s harder to quantify demand from users who don’t convert in the first place, because they saw no support for their system. The recommendations of Bootstrap Studio that aren’t being made; the lists of compatible ARM software it won’t appear on. When it comes to compatibility, lost conversion/adoption is dark matter.