I was referring to other boards, not the Raspberries which have a well supported OS, apologies for not being clear about that. Other board manufacturers often publish distros which have been cobbled together with old kernels and proprietary blobs, then they abandon them when the board is declared obsolete. This is not the case of the Raspberry Pi of course, but for other boards I would check first the above mentioned distros before installing anything by the vendors.

Not to mention that if you really want to tinker you can use pi-gen to customise builds from a desktop without all that much difficulty:

https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen

Worth a play.