I’d always heard issues with them, something about drivers not being in the kernel or something?
And that is correct – Orange pi boards are (mostly) Android-based boards at heart. Anything beyond that, and youll have to deal with lots of tinkering.
Any more information youd want to share
Eh…on my first try, I went with debian and everything felt really half-baked. For example, docker is borked (And I think theres a way to fix it – havent really tried fiddling with it at all.). Sound is also borked (Tried both alsa and pulseaudio, aaand nada.). And I think I managed to “cheat” my way in the “GPU supported land” by installing mesa-utils with the --install-recommends flag (Cant really tell what happened, other than both cpu usage and temps dropped a whole lot after installing it.).
It might be possible installing pi-hole however (pretty sure it runs on any potato nowadays.) Network “just werks” out of the box (Ethernet). Average cpu temps were at 68 to 72 degrees, w/ cpu usage at 80’ish, all cores. (That is while running an youtube video, at 380p. No case, with two passive heatsinks on both the cpu and memory and a small fan blowing right on both of em.).
Those issues simply do not exist on Android. Aside from the lack of customization options and docker, that is.