Werner

That decision is up to you. Give both options a try and decide for yourself. As for me I'd always prefer some free operation system over proprietary stuff unless if have no other choice.

As long as the CPU is 64 bit it should work just fine

Armbian is very limited in both human and financial resources. We cannot afford either supporting software that is EOL upstream for one and a half years now or storing hundreds of thousands of old packages. Don't get me wrong. It would be nice to have stuff kept around and supported way longer. But who should take care and pay for it? docs are unfortunately often outdated, last but not least because of the reasons mentioned above. It is already difficult to keep up with ongoing development and changes and documentation takes time as well. Feel free to help improving the situation and get involved.

Check archive. If it is not there it is gone.

Yes, that will work unless there is some special weirdness in the R1S-H3 that needs custom drivers...which I doubt for now

Yes. However there are various SoC manufacturs for arm64 SoCs like Allwinner, Rockchip, Amlogic and so on and they require custom patching for often both uboot and kernel. So while saying the device tree is indeed the biggest difference it does not boil down to just that.

Image for H5 certainly won't work. Different SoC, even different architecture (32 vs 64 bit). You can give R1 image a try, doesn't look that much different besides the ugly yellow case. No idea how you built r1s images from Armbian since there is no dedicated config for this board in our build system. Maybe you used some sort of fork? Btw. if you don't mind please shorten your signature, like by removing the gaps between the lines. Thanks

tl;dr: Get a proper PSU.

AFAIK no need for something special. If there is no working bootloader on SPI available it should try to boot from eMMC and microSD.

https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/

We do not support 3rd party forks. Ask at the place where you got the image from.

armbian-install is meant to be used inside the running Armbian system from microSD card. It copies itself to NVMe or eMMC or whatever options are available and can be utilized. This tool does not work "offline". Anyway. I never did something like that by myself but maybe you find some hints when you google for keywords like "h616 fel sunxi-fel emmc". fel mode seems something like Rockchips maskrom to utilized the rkdevtool. Maybe Allwinner has something similar

Just like guests registered users can read any topic in any public forum.

Just curios. You executed update-grub after adjustments, right?

Never heard of. Anyway Armbian is not an operating system per se. It is a build framework which creates working Linux images by combining a customized Linux kernel for the specific board with a userspace flavor in either Debian or Ubuntu. The images we provide are in practical POV just a side product from testing the build framework and the actually supported images to a certain level and mostly there for user convenience. Due to limited resources Armbian can only support the most recent upstream LTS userspaces which at the moment are Debian 12 aka Bookworm and Ubuntu 22.04 aka Jammy. The upstream support for Debian Stretch has ended June 30, 2022. If you for once are fine with not receive any further updates for either the kernel or the userspace, and for the other find a way to update your nodejs to a newer version anyways you are good to go. To be future proof for a few years I'd suggest to start from scratch with Debian 12 or wait a few month and use Ubuntu Noble which will supersede Jammy in April.

Welcome Those boards usually don't come with a standardized interface like UEFI which makes universal/generic images possible. So customization is necessary for each and every board. This is especially the case for so called tvboxes which makes deal with such devices a huge pain. Refer https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_FAQ/#why-i-cannot-simply-shove-a-random-image-into-my-board-to-work-like-on-my-pc and https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_FAQ/#why-does-armbian-not-support-tv-boxes-in-general-the-market-is-huge Well I guess there is a reason why everything gets faster and bigger since there is a demand. Or maybe people more and more unlearn skills to optimize stuff.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ What's that? Cannot answer the other questions in detail. Not my department Cheers

Just remove armbian from the list. There won't be any further updates anyways. Userspace is way outdated.

Yes. Both kernels vendor and edge have pros and cons. Usually switching is possible via armbian-config.

Update to a more recent kernel. Check if armbian-config offers one with matching headers or build your own debs using the build framework: https://github.com/armbian/build

Check archives: archive.armbian.com If it is not there its gone.

Tried armbian-install?

moved

moved

This is called zram and default in all Armbian images.

What kind of input?