Sorry, but I have to disagree. I found the online support for OPi to be sadly lacking, Ubuntu especially was not well supported, and the people were unfriendly and unhelpful. EX: I say I have a problem with Ubuntu, and all I get is that I shouldn’t use Ubuntu, I should use [fill in the blank]; NOT HELPING! One person suggested some code to try, and if I had tried it, I would have erased my HDD. Extremely NOT HELPFUL!

In other words, it isn’t just about the SBC, it’s about the SBC owners.

Entirely true. I’ve downloaded several hundred gigabytes of their rk** developer kit. I was surprised by the haste it protruded. Well it all works right? Maybe contributors are to few.

What?!?!

What on earth (or anywhere else) are you talking about?

That just isn’t how it works.

Where do you get this nonsense???

It is the same software, and I very much doubt “hastily assembled hacky and outdated…” is even remotely true.
Do you have any sort of evidence to support your baseless assertions? No? None? Not even one example you can provide? I didn’t think so.

I would also suggest comparison w/ an Intel N100 (the RK3588 kicks it ass on Passmark, and blows most i3 and some Celeron and other lower end Intel CPUs out of the water).

But you need to add that (and that is about $20 in US via Amazon) to the cost of the build. If there were affordable WiFi 6/BT/5G that would work (and finding HCL for Orange Pi 5 for peripherals is no easy feat, and their customer service doesn’t always respond to questions about things like what other company’s camera modules work), that would be even a better way to go (I can get unlimited 5G internet for about $50/mo).

As far as benchmarks, might want to try Steam and see if you can run a Windows title using Steam’s WINE. While I don’t think the Playstation5 is going to be worried, if you can run Steam games, and other, with reasonable performance (>30FPS, ideally 60-100; I don’t know that the human eye can tell much above 60, which is right at the edge of how fast the retina can refresh).

Finally, one other issue is operating system selection. With RPi there was a growing number of Linux distributions (and I think even Windows, if you do that sort of thing) for RPi, I don’t think loading openSUSE w/ LXQt (my current preferred RPi desktop OS) on Orange Pi is going to be a lot of fun.

Orange PI seems to have an Arch based distro that has built-in support for Android (and if WINE works, then Windows too.) This would give you access to a wide range of titles, some of which might actually have a useful UI on a desktop (e.g. software designed to work with Samsung’s desktop mode). I am not 100% sure why mainstream Linux distro’s don’t provide Android app options (you can DIY) as it would be a pretty large increase in the number of software titles (although, I must admit, I have not yet tested every application available to me in just the openSUSE repositories–over 400K I think, so it will take some time). Being able to pull from Debian (only distro w/ more packages than openSUSE) was always a plus w/ the RPi, as a lot of packages were ported. OpenSUSE, which has a multi-target build system (that other distros use), lets a repository manager just pick what platforms to build for, including Arm64 (or Arm8, RISC, PowerPC, IBM Z series, etc.) so there were a lot of RPi options (plus, its my day to day desktop OS)

Good point, Panca – I agree 100%.

On Orpi5+ you have a dedicated wifi 6 bt 5.4 M2 card for less as 15 USD shipping included, it also carry IR sensor for a remote conroler and has HDMI in port!

Not true, with ubuntu based distros is supported, I have a plex running with 2x 4tb external ssd and 2tb internal + 256 Gb on nvme for files that I need when thing is booting, all work fine.

Nope. Hw acceleration is not supported for the rockchip (yet). Encoding is but an option.