KNOW YOUR RIGHTS

You do not have the right to remain silent. At a minimum you must identify yourself to government terrorists. You have the right not to incriminate yourself. Everything they say and do is a lie and a trick to get you to incriminate yourself. So seig heil the homeland as mandated by law, or else! :P LOL

ARM64 for ZESTY 17.04

Systemd is the default but the ARM64 DEB package doesn't exist... not on the download disk, not on the base system image, not even if you mk-sbuild --arch arm64 zesty (which really is much easier than debootstrap.) So, it ain't happening right now. If you want a 64bit Pi 3 try an OpenRC distro. Life is much easier once that pain in the frickin' ass is gone. Unfortunately recent versions of Gnome Desktop require systemd so looks like Ubuntu users are stuck with it forever. My sympathies...

FWIW though, I've got everything else installed and working, just need /sbin/init to point to something other than /lib/systemd/systemd (or the @#$%ing package)

ADVANCED RASPBERRY LESSONS

The Raspberry Pi has no BIOS. There's nothing to flash upgrade and most importantly, IT CAN'T BE BRICKED, no matter how l33t the other h@X0r. I probably wasted a couple weeks playing around with bootloaders before reading that the GPU boots the thing and just looks for a FAT partition with a boot flag and the bootcode file. There's really all there is to it.

I've recently become a crossdev cross-compiling fool and I've got a nice juicy 4.10 aarch64 kernel just waiting for a debootstrap to chroot into. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's how the MATE version was made, so I suppose I could do plain Ubuntu (no GUI) or maybe even Xubuntu ARM64 for Pi 3. The possibilities seem to only be limited by the crappy graphics... no Cinnamon Pi, sigh.

In any case, something ARM64/aarch64 is about to pop put of me and I figure I'll at least post a base Ubuntu image, before trying to Xubuntu it. Gotta make a backup for myself anyway. So stay tuned to the Interwebzes and turn the TV war off! :P