i'll try to set some time aside this week to carve out a vanilla 18.04 distro on a partition; if i recall from the docs going with a VM install is preferred but old habits die hard i have a nice little variety of boards, i'll lurk around more and figure out which boards need someone helping with builds and maintenance the most and go from there!!
i am fairly inexperienced with the real deep, under-the-hood type work here, but i definitely think i could get up to speed fairly soon and begin playing around with the configuration scripting, and perhaps even a forked compton to take advantage of the progress i am seeing with the work on mali and mesa projects.
armbian already has a software option for a more-or-less complete webserver, ispconfig - with a handful of tools geared towards design, it wouldn't be too hard to get something going for webdevs/webdesigners, who might enjoy the convenience of a cheap and extremely mobile way to prototype projects. something like a tweaked spacevim, some tools like the 'pastel' rust crate, zsh with 256-color support. all in good time, i am wary of making huge promises here - but man, the potential is exciting to think about
all i have is a text file with important repo URL's and the minimal commands needed to get it all going, it is deceptively simple. i started to post it here, with some added comments to explain this and that, but when almost done i realized that it was basically a completely different thing unto itself, so i will post it in a more relevant forum (think i saw a tutorials board -). this also will let me go take some screenshots to illustrate the differences between the handful of forks that i use depending on what my needs are.... i will reply again in a few hours as i'm heading to dinner now, with the link to that post.
however, if you don't mind leaning on google for things like configuring i3 and compton, here's my 'scratchpad' file: https://gist.github.com/jeromescuggs/7aabd0191e09be1811c786ccd6b7d280