@Jerry Falken well this forum is more oriented on hardware and compiling stuffs rather than generic linux info that you can find every where on the net so I won't answer on this, google it You can remain also on old distros such as debian 9 stretch minimal without gui but with ssh support to run headless ngix apps. I don't think you need newer distros to run such easy apps , the important is improve a good firewall and also a fail2ban app to protect your system but, again, those are more generic linux questions rather than support on tvboxes socs

Thank you! Unfortunately, this didn't help. The device won't boot at all and immediately goes into MASKROM after rebooting. I just built Ubuntu 24.04.3 from here - https://github.com/markbirss/rk3506-ubuntu and it booted perfectly without any problems. I'm testing it now.

Have just tested Forky (Debian) release on both the 2A and the 2F, and in both cases the wireless driver survived an upgrade. I also tested the Plucky release on the 2A, and the wireless driver did not survive the stock upgrade. I have not tested the Plucky version on the 2F yet. Also it should be noted that the cron implementation in the Forky version for the 2A is fouled up. Any ordinary user's crontab has to be edited by root. Bad permissions on a number of files. Nice to know that at least the wireless adapter problem has attracted someone's interest.

Thanks! I think it will be a little bit of work, but I agree that it would be the best way forward. So I'll attempt to start again with a fresh install. Really appreciate your help!

So I have tried all the different images for the Opiz3 from the Orange pi website with the dts, I have tried 2 of the desktop images for the opiz3 from armbian. All of them result in the desktop environment not booting correctly. with Armbian I even got to the point where there are no errors in the lightdm logs, yet still a black screen. However with all those different images, a simple manual restart of lightdm (systemctl restart lightdm.service, will fix it and make the desktop show up.