Where do you buy an Orange Pi? When I was researching these devices I found it to be extremely weird/sketchy. These are three different websites all apparently from different companies:
- http://www.orangepi.org (note: https does not work)
- http://www.orangepi.org (note: https does not work)
Then when you get the device it won't do anything new after a while because the vendor never maintains their distro and the GPU or device tree are is proprietary so nobody else can either. If you're lucky maybe there's an Armbian build which marries new userspace with the older kernel and its unmaintained drivers.
This is why Raspberry Pi still dominates this market.
The OPis themselves were quite decent devices, Raspbian worked very well on them.
Then again, we might not even be seeing the same site, since it forces http:// and could be modified in transit by anyone on the path of either of our ISPs and the web host.
Their software I would not touch, but I never had to. Most Allwinner and Rockchip boards are well supported upstream. I just upstreamed support for Orange Pi 5 Plus a week ago or so.
All you ever need with these random boards is to build your own Linux kernel and bootloader for them, which is a few fairly standard steps, and then you can use any normal aarch64 distro on them, even if the board is not "supported" by the distro.
I just have a script to cross-build the recent kernel for the boards I own, and update it remotely. Not a huge issue.