[megous]

Orange Pi / Xunlong is a stable brand that's been primarily on Aliexpress for 7-8 years IIRC, producing various boards, all of which work fine for me. Very reliable seller, and the product + it's cheap. In the past they had Orange Pi PC, which was half the price of Raspberry Pi 2 or whatnot and much better in connectivity (4x real USB host interfaces, ...).

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.

https://xnux.eu/log/088.html

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.