Even though RPI Zero 2W is quite limited and 32bit OS would work much better, Ubuntu 24.04+ only ships as arm64 so there’s nothing you can do. Flash a SD Card with arm64 Ubuntu and choose the “Server” option.

Post-installation

Enable user-accessible dmesg: edit /etc/sysctl.d/10-kernel-hardening.conf and kernel.dmesg_restrict = 0.

ext4

Enable trim. You need to enable discard for all of your ext4 partitions: simply add the discard option to /etc/fstab. Note that swap on a swap partition will perform discard automatically. Make sure the kernel supports trim on RPI flash card: lsblk --discard should print non-zero value in DISC-GRAN.

swap

512mb of RAM isn’t enough for running software and apt update at the same time - it will crash RPI.

sudo fallocate -l 2G /swap
sudo chmod 0600 /swap
sudo mkswap /swap
sudo swapon /swap

Add this to /etc/fstab:

/swap	none	swap	sw	0	0

Setup wifi & remote access (ssh)

• Set new hostname, e.g. rpizero: sudo hostnamectl set-hostname rpizero
• Setup WiFi via netplan.
• Make sure rpizero.local host works on your LAN: Ubuntu LAN Local
• Make sure you can ssh to the machine via public key, then disable ssh password access.
• Reboot & test that remote ssh via wifi works.

You can now unplug the RPI from your monitor and keyboard and continue the setup via ssh/byobu.

Install basic software

sudo apt update
sudo apt -V dist-upgrade
sudo apt install git vim htop fish net-tools curl whois
sudo apt autoremove --purge snap
sudo update-alternatives --config editor     # select vim.basic

fish

chsh -s /usr/bin/fish

To add environment variables, add them at the end of the ~/.config/fish/config.fish file, e.g.:

export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/local"