

Orange Pi makes some cool stuff. It’s nice to see them at it again.
And this feels like leaning into their strengths - great power for the price in a small form factor.
I found Orange Pi boards just okay as alternate Raspberry Pi boards, because many precompiled Pi projects aren’t compatible.
But when I’m building my own thing on a Linux base, Orange Pi is a fantastic option - generally great hardware for the price, and a solid ecosystem of Linux base images (for a very affordable board, anyway.)
Yes. I don’t imagine we will see Linux Mint on these soon (though I could be wrong).
I have put command line Armbian on previous Orange Pi devices happily enough.
With the AI bait in the ad text, I’m guessing the first adopters of this will be folks running a custom purpose home headless local LLM?
I’m still tempted to get one for my own shop PC and just run Armbian desktop. I bet Octoprint would run great on this.