ok, so my flaming new helios finally arrived (after Christmas, what a pity) and, after spending some time assembling it (it's not the easiest thing in the world, expecially if you want to attach the mainboard BEFORE connecting all the cables, as specified within the instructions) I started configuring it.
As i don't like the easy way (I'd have bought something else, if i would have) I went for a daily build with Groovy (i don't need OMV for my purpose and am quite accostumed to the ubuntu way), and the first thing i did was to make it a rolling release, putting devel in the place of groovy in sources.list, so that now i run hirsute (even if with a groovy userspace, as armbian has no hirsute userspace yet). Here comes a question... could it be possible to have a devel channel, replicating the 'latest' channel, so that once hirsute overcomes groovy i don't have to edit armbian.list to reflect the change?
OK, back to the testing... i come from many years with a dns-340l from d-link with fun_plug, not exactly the most user friendly situation and not exactly the top on the hardware side, so i can say i know how to make things work, so i migrated some config files, moved the disks and guess what? my shares came back to life in not more than a couple of hours, and now with a mariadb server (instead of an old mysql 4.something), and i can say i see the difference. I use kodi with a central db and (maybe the db server, maybe the ram, maybe who knows) everything is faster now... before every database read was a pity, now it's quite instantaneous. BTW, i had an usb-c to hdmi cable hanging around and it seems to be working (at least, after enabling the correct dtbo,, it shows the login on screen) so i tried to build kodi (i reached 80° C while building, is that normal? that's why i said 'flaming' in the start) and now have to try it as a service... i used to have an headless kodi installed on a rpi4 to update my library, but i guess i could have an instance running directly on the NAS, headless or not (i'd like to try how is kodi rendered on the helios)
Now, another question... until now I saw only the upper fan spin (and you can see i reached quite high temperatures), what could have gone wrong?
Anyway, the Helios64 is a real beast, it didn't freeze on me yet and is really over my expectations, thanks Helios team