CaptKoala

That's great to hear, genuinely the first positive impact I've heard of TikTok having.

I will however state the obvious, you could find most, if not all the same information with a search engine.

Thankfully, I'm not forced to interact with any of those, it's not a problem here. Here in Australia, TikTok is everywhere, and I feel at times as if I'm the only one here that hasn't touched it, that doesn't stop my friends from ignoring the fact I've asked them countless times not to send tiktoks to me.

One of said friends is a nurse, one of the smartest people I know. She told me how to do CPR based on what she'd seen in a TikTok, as someone that's done the CPR training, and actually performed it, I was really upset that her knowledge had been overwritten in a very short time of her TikTok addiction. I'm finding such cases are becoming more and more common kately and it's terrifying.

Wouldn't be if they weren't constantly trying to load hardware I own with unwanted ads, software and unnecessary shit nobody asked for.

I'm not sure this will help, though I'll suggest anyway that you poke around looking for (I hope I got this right) "rkdevtool", I believe you can get it from somewhere in the Orangepi tools, I found it while looking into putting orangepi os (droid) onto it.

Do let me know how you go, I have a copy if you can't find it that I'm happy to share. I haven't yet tried it so I can't speak to whether or not it works.

I'm actually attempting to convert my windows install into a VM these past few days, it's most of the way there now, just need to get the VM to actually boot from that drive.

It was my original intent upon switching to Linux that I would VM my windows, however only in the last few days of trying (read: failing) to get mods for a few games working under proton, that I've really upped my effort.

If there are any resources you recommend, I'm all ears.

It's a ballache through and through. I am (cautiously) optimistic for the Orangepi 5's future, Raxda and several others have release RK3588 powered SBCs, my hope is that through some level of market saturation and community development to prevail.

I do actually have an RPi4, it's on full-time Kodi duty at present. I'll have to pick up a few more SD cards to load up and mess with.

I bought the Orangepi first funnily enough, because it was the peak of the RPi shortage and I didn't want to spend blood money on an aging SBC, I did pick the RPi up the moment stock was available though, no regrets, it's been rock solid since first boot, and even easier to work with than the community attests to.

I love that little fucker to bits, I just wish it had the power of the Pi 5 (orange OR raspberry), as it drops a fair few frames during 4k directplay, 1080/1440p runs butter smooth though.

It's a shame really, I'd be first in line to buy the Orangepi Neo (their incoming 7840U handheld) were it not for the piss poor experience I've had with the Pi. Now I'm firmly planted in the "wait and see, but probably not" camp.

I wasn't aware Arch had builds available for arm, I will certainly give it a look-see.

Unfortunately the Orangepi 5 is somewhat shitty to hop around with, many builds either don't support the RK3588 at all, or certain things just don't work at all on most (I'm looking at you GPU acceleration).

On top of this, the SPI flash can be quite a pain to work with, due to orangepi doing the bare minimum to ship the product, I would really love to see dual-boot in future for it, though my expectations have been seriously tempered when it comes to orangepi.

The result of this, is that any distro I installed to the SSD removed boot priority from the SD slot, ergo, without formatting/overwriting the SPI flash, it will refuse to boot from SD, even with no SSD present. Some builds boot fine from having been directly flashed to the SSD, so far Batocera, Ubuntu and the J-Reik Rockchip Ubuntu have all booted flawlessly when directly flashed to the SSD, no luck with most others though.

I must admit though, that RK3588 is blazingly fast for how little power it draws. The hardware is top notch, I just wish the software weren't lagging so far behind. If I remember rightly the incoming kernel should resolve many of these issues, I believe it's still running 5.10 currently.

Apologies for the rant, during my writing of this reply I came across a repo on GitHub that someone's been building for the Orangepi, I'll give it a shot and hope for the best I guess! Seems to have rkbootloader paired with it, which might help dodge the bullet that the SPI flash can feel like at times.

I hadn't considered (on more than a surface level) this viewpoint, I do agree wholeheartedly regarding getting your money's worth doesn't necessarily come down to ownership, but rather enjoyment/fulfillment.

I held a micro$hit game pass subscription for quite a while, and (almost) always felt I was getting my money's worth out of it, if not for game pass, there's quite a few games I'd never have considered buying, some of these have been the most enjoyable I have played.

With that said however, I much prefer not having to worry about a game in my library disappearing because a license ran out, or it was dropped from a service. I spend about 80% of my gaming budget on discounted stuff, usually a couple years after release, when most of the bugs are ironed out.

This, I switched from win10 to Mint, the only issues I had with the transition were self-inflicted, or stemmed from me approaching it with a windows mindset rather than the mindset of learning a new OS.

I've settled in quite well now, and actively cringe when I'm forced to boot into my windows install for some reason or another.

I've been distro-hopping with my orangepi, however I can only do so much hopping on arm, I'm considering adding yet another drive to my rig with which to try out some other distros and see if I can find a better fit than (the already great fit) Linux Mint.

I would consider myself an intermediate-advanced user (not quite power user), do you think trying Arch is a good idea at this stage?

Meirl

Welcome to the good life, with the exception of VR and (rootkit) anticheat for multiplayer, it's all smiles over here.

Hope Mint treats you as well as it's treated me! (Even though most of my tinkering breaks stuff, reinstall incoming I suspect)