Are you aware that mainline linux runs on these Jetson devices? It's a bit of annoying work, but you can be running ArchLinuxARM.

https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/pull/1580

Edit: It's been a while since I did this, but I had to manually build the kernel, overwrite a dtb file maybe (and Linux_for_Tegra/bootloader/l4t_initrd.img) and run something like this (for xavier)

  sudo ./flash.sh -N 128.30.84.100:/srv/arch -K /home/aeden/out/Image -d /home/aeden/out/tegra194-p2972-0000.dtb jetson-xavier eth0

How close does any of that get a person to having Ubuntu 24.04 running on their board?

(I guess we can put aside the issue of Nvidia's closed source graphics drivers for the moment)

Isn't the Jetson line more of an embedded line and not a end-user desktop? Why would you run Ubuntu?

Jetson are embedded devices that run ubuntu. Ubuntu is the OS it ships with.

The Jetson TX2 developer kit makes a very nice developer machine - an ARM64 machine with good graphics acceleration, CUDA, etc.

In any case, Ubuntu is what it comes with.

If you spent enough time and energy on it.. I'm fairly confident you could get the newest Ubuntu running. You'd have to build your own kernel, manually generate the initramfs, figure out how to and then flash it. You'd probably run into stupid little problems like the partition table the flash script makes doesn't allocate enough space for the kernel you've built.. I'm sure there would be hiccups, at the very least, but everything's out there to do it.

You could install Ubuntu 24.04 using debootstrap. That would just get you the user space, though, you'd still have to build your own kernel image.

Back in 2018 I've been involved in a product development based on TX2. I had to untangle the entire nasty mess of Bash and Python spaghetti that is JetPack SDK to get everything sensibly integrated into our custom firmware build system and workflow (no, copying your application files over prebaked rootfs on a running board is absolutely NOT how it's normally done). You basically need a few deb packages with nvidia libs for your userspace, and swipe a few binaries from Jetpack that have to be run with like 20 undocumented arguments in right order to do the rest (image assembly, flashing, signing, secure boot stuff, etc), the rest of the system could be anything. Right when I was finished, a 3rd party Yocto layer implementing essentially the same stuff that I came up with, and the world could finally forget about horrors of JetPack for good. I also heard that it has somewhat improved later on, but I have not touch any NVidia SoCs since (due to both trauma and moving to a different field).