ARM laptops and dev boards are fantastic for quiet, portable Rust work, but their package ecosystems still lag behind x86. To keep your Dioxus workflow smooth, make sure the following pieces are in place before installing dx.
- Rust toolchain bits –
rustup
toolchain install stable gives you the host compiler, whilerustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
enables the wasm build that powers Dioxus web bundles. Without the wasm target,dx build --platform web
will fail early. cargo-binstall
– most ARM distros don’t ship Dioxus binaries, so fetching the precompiled CLI matters. The one-liner curl script installs cargo-binstall, which in turn grabs the right architecture build of dx and any helper crates. Skipping this forces a long-from-source compile every update.- WebKitGTK stack – Dioxus desktop shells rely on a system WebView. On ARM Linux you almost always need to install
libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev
,libxdo-dev
, and basic build tools (build-essential
,curl
,wget
,file
) manually, since lighter distros omit them. - SSL and compression libs – crates like reqwest, openssl-sys, and the lightningcss pipeline need headers. Install
libssl-dev
,librsvg2-dev
, and friends up front so cargo install dioxus-cli doesn’t bomb out mid-compile. - Extra GTK integration – if you plan to expose tray icons or file dialogs, pull in
libayatana-appindicator3-dev
(tray) and, optionally,zenity
for WSL-friendly dialogs. ARM package repositories often split these out into optional groups. Once those dependencies are in place,cargo install dioxus-cli --locked
(orcargo binstall dioxus-cli
) will produce a working dx binary for ARM. From there,dx build --platform web
anddx serve
behave the same as on x86—just with quieter fans.