DeterminedOpier

Yes but you are smart Igor.   I'm actually writing a book on building a home media server. Not for smart people. i wrote one of the first website automation books for Wiley back in 1996, and gave away on the CD what was probably the first remote authoring software for the masses, long before wordpress.  When I figure out a repeatable path to do cool stuff easy I like to share it, and I think the pis are an absolute revolution.  Figured I'd keep the instructions on an os as easy as possible and consistent. I'll try this again in a month or so and see if it's fixed. No biggie. Linux Mint is pretty light and you set up a user and pw so you don't have to go searching for the login.
 
Thanks for answering Igor. 

Thankyou for the time you take to clarify explanations.  
 
You know, @NicoD, I think a great article/video for you would be to explain the difference between the versions of debian/ubuntu (buster, bionic, jessie, etc.), and the different versions of the kernel. What is legacy vs mainline? What does it mean when one has support and the other doesn't? (can't you just copy it over).  Why are these features, like hardware acceleration, so difficult to make work?  I would write it if I understood it, but I don't. And as you can see in this thread, smart guys like all of you don't even understand what we don't understand.  I can tell you that my methodology is to wait until someone posts a useful link and try it, because I have no idea what changing a kernel in armbian config even does, and what it would effect.  I wouldn't say it's like "explain it for the dumb people."  Because I personally wrote a book on remote web publishing in Perl for John Wiley in 1996, and gave away working software, before anyone even envisioned wordpress.  I'm sure a lot of other people who look stupid here are actually not at all.  You don't know what you don't know, and I have yet to find a good explanation of how these operating systems work now. 
 
I just asked Stephen from Opi if one of his images has hardware acceleration, and he said it did. Yet my experience with his images are that they don't even work.  So if someone did this, it would be great to explain why things work here and they don't work there, and why, if it works on an old kernel, why anyone would want to even use "mainline" where all kinds of nasty things are broken (like not being able to log into my gmail).  
 
Just an idea.  I love @NicoD's approach, even if it is usually not from the perspective of what I use pis for at all.  Two wives and six kids later, I don't have a lot of time for retro-gaming. :) 

Yea you are probably young though. I'm 54, and wrote one of the first books on remote web publishing (in perl) back in 1996, and never had a computer course in my life. Those days are gone for me. My brain just doesn't want learn entire new things anymore.  I had to ask my sysadmin the other day to remind me how to use nmap so I could find my pi on the network.   At this point I'm just hoping that Mr. @ldiaz can make this thing work. I have a pile of Opi Ones from a failed project a couple years ago and I want to build a print farm for my twins.  This would be a real gift for my lazy old brain.

Yea you are probably young though. I'm 54, and wrote one of the first books on remote web publishing (in perl) back in 1996, and never had a computer course in my life. Those days are gone for me. My brain just doesn't want learn entire new things anymore.  I had to ask my sysadmin the other day to remind me how to use nmap so I could find my pi on the network.   At this point I'm just hoping that Mr. @ldiaz can make this thing work. I have a pile of Opi Ones from a failed project a couple years ago and I want to build a print farm for my twins.  This would be a real gift for my lazy old brain.

If someone wants to use this deb, you do:
 
sudo apt-remove --purge chromium
 
wget https://apt.armbian.com/pool/main/c/chromium-browser/chromium_69.0.3497.93-1~deb9u1_armhf.deb
 
sudo dpkg -i chromium_69.0.3497.93-1~deb9u1_armhf.deb
 

Yea I guess it's really rtfm.  Can't believe I found an actual bug instead of just purely doing something wrong.  That's new. Thanks Igor.  

Oh it's on stretch btw.   Just fyi, burning xenial to the same card same board resulted in the normal flawlesstissitude.  But I'm trying to install NextCloudPi and it only works with stretch.