Orange Pi5B 4GB+32GB Rockchip RK3588S 8-Core 64 Bit Single Board Computer with 32GB onboard eMMC Flash, Wi-Fi6/Bluetooth 5.0, Compatible Linux/Android/Debian/Ubuntu (16GB128GB+Power Supply)

I have been using it as a small home server sinve now. I have no issues at all. Its very stable. It came in an nice amazon package and inside a secured box. It was quite easy to understand it and how to install a custom os into it and It's neither too big nor too small.

At the time I bought this, the OrangePi 5B was one of the best deals on a Rockchip aarch64 SBC you could get, and the 16GB+128GB was one of the biggest versions available. There are somewhat beefier options now, but it was really quite a beast at the time and is still no joke. It blows the more expensive Raspberry options away, if you're looking to build a strong-ish system.The good: Performance is great, and it's a breeze to build with any of the several nice little case kits available online. The feature set for the money you're laying out is a good price/performance value.The okay: There are several somewhat-mostly-working, increasingly outdated, operating system builds available from the vendor to help you get your project up and running. Support from Recalbox has also been added, but it's still fairly broken and buggy.The bad: The RK3588S is not a RK3588. And Orange Pi 5B is not an Orange Pi 5. They're really similar SoCs, to the point that a lot of RK3588 stuff runs, but... not everything. Good luck getting wifi, Mesa, or the weird Vulkan port working unless you're using the exact OS shipped by the vendor and you *never ever update it.* Like most embedded hardware vendors, they've done just enough software work to get one thing working and then effectively abandoned it: nothing is merged upstream, so you're stuck using their weird patches. Things that you think will boot on an Orange Pi 5... won't on a 5B.The very bad: That 128GB eMMC? The documented procedure for writing to it is 100% wrong, and points to utilities and kernel drivers that don't exist. I think it's written for the 5, and not the 5B. As far as I can tell there is literally NO WAY WHATSOEVER to write to the eMMC unless you use their weird Chinese-only Windows utility and intend to write an OS image I don't want to use. I don't have any Windows systems, so... the ability to actually write an OS to the SBC is effectively nonexistent.The ridiculously bad: There's effectively no community support whatsoever. Orange Pi the company participates in nothing, owners of the product have so little information on the product as to be unable to contribute to projects themselves, and open source projects don't use these products so don't support them. The thing is so niche, and so poorly supported, that it's kind of a dead end. It's a shame, because it's objectively better hardware — for cheaper — than the more commonly known products.Don't get me wrong, I'm getting some use out of this thing, but almost a year after I bought it because it's been such a pain in the rear. I went on a two-week-long odessey of rebuilding entire operating systems from source for RK3588S support and trying to hunt down the proper source for their Mali drivers to make this thing work... and never got it right. Months later eventually I came back to it, installed their outdated OS, and manually built all my services on top of it.I don't know that I'd ever buy one again. For the amount of time I spent trying to get this thing to do the simple job of being a small, low power/medium-performance ARM Linux system... I could have built several slightly larger machines with commodity hardware. I love the ARM platform, but these embedded hardware vendors are doing a terrible job of making it a viable choice, and Orange is no exception.

This SBC is phenomenal! The core count and memory in this thing makes it run like a boss! It kicks my Raspberry Pi 4B's butt! I'm slowly replacing all my Pi's with this in my Kubernetes cluster and Docker Swarm cluster.I highly recommend this for anyone finding they've outgrown the performance of the Raspberry Pi 4B but still wanting an affordable SBC.

I tried connecting to my 802.1 wireless network 2.4G and 5G, and neither would connect. Wired worked, but wireless does not. Search internet for solution and did not find one.Edit: I was successful to connect. You must do a sudo apt update && apt upgrade. This update a lot, and them you are able to connect on the debian server version and debain xcfe version that I tried.

Utter garbage, useless.

Didn't support my display, causing me to spend hours to troubleshoot misdiagnosed boot issue.Hard to configure first-time wifi connection as all provided by the manufacturer images use NetworkManager. Ended up using Rockchip Ubuntu 2204 from Joshua-Riek because it still uses ifupdown scripts and that was the only way to get it to connect to wifi.

The default OS is an OrangePI Android distro (not English default selection). I used my phone to translate well enough to switch it over to English and then toy around in the OS for a bit. I was able to stream YouTube at 1080p with good frame rate. That said, there's no terminal and Android is hot garbage.I've got the Orange Pi 5B 16GB+128GB variant. It took me all of 10 minutes to download a vanilla armbian distro and get it working. By default, the armbian dtb (device tree blob) file is set to a orangepi-5 rather than the orangepi-5b. It only took a single config change and reboot to get that squared away so wifi and other peripherals worked.replace fdtfile=rockchip/rk3588s-orangepi-5.dtb in /boot/armbianEnv.txt with fdtfile=rockchip/rk3588s-orangepi-5b.dtbIt seems like it's a good value for the money. Unfortunately, it overheated and rebooted within 5 minutes of running. I started a speed test just to see what kind of network capabilities were and it seemed to be capable of pulling about 160mb/s over wireless and then just black-screened and rebooted. The graphics came back distorted and green so I turned it off and left it off for a bit. I've got a little heatsink on it now, but I haven't pushed it hard since. I'll update if this overheating and rebooting seems to be the norm.

Met expectations and there was sufficient trustworthy information about the trade offs and limitations to make the system usable.