TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

How are the Orange Pis?

I got the 4 GB Orange Pi version of the Zero W2. The performance is there but I found it to be a bit quirky. That said, you might have better luck using the manufacturer's images. Only reason I didn't was that they were several years old and on an unsupported kernel. Took some doing, but I finally got Armbian working stable.

Tips:

• Don't enable zram for more than 50%. It'll happily compress more than that, but allocating more than 50% causes all kinds of random weirdness and crashes.
• The GPU either doesn't work or isn't stable. I gave up on it and just pre-encoded the media to a format that Jellyfin wouldn't need to transcode.
• Make sure the antenna is mounted away and perpendicular from the main board. Had a lot of weird EMF-induced crashes when the antenna was parallel to the board inside a case.
• You will need a heatsink. Unless you underclock it below 1 GHz, a heatsink isn't optional like it is on a Pi.
• Unless you just need the USB A ports or the IR receiver, skip the expansion board. The ribbon cable that connects it exacerbates the EMF issues. The 3 buttons on the front do not work with the Armbian builds (and the overlay that enables them doesn't seem to work on newer kernels and no one seems to be working on it). The analog audio, likewise, does not work on Armbian with newer kernels and, last I checked, there are no overlays.

I also have a 4 GB Banana Pi in the same "Pi Zero" form factor. I haven't messed with it much, but the three things I've noticed so far is the wifi chip is much better than the Orange Pi (I think it's a Realtek chip here), the Bluetooth doesn't work in Armbian (though it's close), and it has eMMC which makes the system much faster.