esbeeb

I've got a NanoPi Neo Core 2, with the NAS kit.  It lets me attach a 2.5" SATA SSD drive, all contained in an aluminium case (which elevates it above "toy", to my eyes).  The whole kit, minus SSD hard drive, was about $80 (and I'd call this a good value, worth it), however shipping from China took a long time (like a few weeks to a month).  Disk performance isn't stellar, but it doesn't suck either.  Much more performant-feeling than a Raspberry Pi.  It's adequate, to make your own personal LAN server, like say OpenMediaVault (for serving SMB file shares), or Nextcloud (DAV file shares, with SSL encryption, work great in Gnome Nautilus out-of-the-box, or Linux Mint's file manager, Nemo, once you install the package "davfs2"). 
 
Small home offices should be a good fit for this kit, where LAN file-share usage day-to-day is light-to-mediumly demanding.
 
What I love about this kit is that the H5 CPU has decent mainline kernel support.  This helps to assure me that this board won't just be a "flash in the pan", and I'll very likely be able to get kernel security updates for at least a few years into the future.
 
I mention this all to underscore my earlier point that to get something minimally sturdy, performant, long-lasting and above all useful in a way that goes beyond a tinkerer's toy (which can be a great starting point for many, don't get me wrong), then to me, this $80 kit is about the lowest I'd personally go.  For $20, I'd rather go eat a pizza or something.

OK, you've got me there.  I must say I dislike the mUSB power connector, and would prefer a sane barrel connector.

In this case we only call @nachoparker install script from Softy menu: https://github.com/armbian/config/blob/master/debian-software#L523-L525

@yogui  @esbeeb @Igor and the rest
 
The curl installer (and softy) should be fixed now. Still testing it but if you want to try it out and confirm that would be great.

Also generating an image for the OrangePi Zero Plus 2, should be uploaded to ownyourbits.com/downloads/testing shortly
 
I managed to have Sury provide a php7.2-redis package for armhf, so it shouldn't break again

Looking for somebody to test the banana pi image (I don't own one), and if you guys want images for any board not yet supported just tell me.

I've got a NanoPi Neo Core 2, with the NAS kit.  It lets me attach a 2.5" SATA SSD drive, all contained in an aluminium case (which elevates it above "toy", to my eyes).  The whole kit, minus SSD hard drive, was about $80 (and I'd call this a good value, worth it), however shipping from China took a long time (like a few weeks to a month).  Disk performance isn't stellar, but it doesn't suck either.  Much more performant-feeling than a Raspberry Pi.  It's adequate, to make your own personal LAN server, like say OpenMediaVault (for serving SMB file shares), or Nextcloud (DAV file shares, with SSL encryption, work great in Gnome Nautilus out-of-the-box, or Linux Mint's file manager, Nemo, once you install the package "davfs2"). 
 
Small home offices should be a good fit for this kit, where LAN file-share usage day-to-day is light-to-mediumly demanding.
 
What I love about this kit is that the H5 CPU has decent mainline kernel support.  This helps to assure me that this board won't just be a "flash in the pan", and I'll very likely be able to get kernel security updates for at least a few years into the future.
 
I mention this all to underscore my earlier point that to get something minimally sturdy, performant, long-lasting and above all useful in a way that goes beyond a tinkerer's toy (which can be a great starting point for many, don't get me wrong), then to me, this $80 kit is about the lowest I'd personally go.  For $20, I'd rather go eat a pizza or something.

I suggest being willing to spend considerably more than $20.  Once you go too cheap, the quality of workmanship goes down so much, that you'll likely end up regretting you didn't spend more, when your board fails on you with the slightest mishap.  For example, don't expect all these Raspberry Pi knockoffs to be anywhere as robustly constructed as the Raspberry Pi itself (which is entirely made out industrial-grade components, albeit the performance is slow).  I do not work for Raspberry Pi, BTW, but I own two of them, and appreciate their robust construction.
 
Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of cheap.  But what I want is "Cheap and Cheery", not "Cheap and Grumpy."  Excruciatingly cheap boards will likely bite you for your cheapness.  There's a slightly higher price to go from "Cheap and Grumpy", up to "Cheap and Cheery."  Lurking on this forum for a good long while will eventually help you to discern between the two.

I've got a NanoPi Neo Core 2, with the NAS kit.  It lets me attach a 2.5" SATA SSD drive, all contained in an aluminium case (which elevates it above "toy", to my eyes).  The whole kit, minus SSD hard drive, was about $80 (and I'd call this a good value, worth it), however shipping from China took a long time (like a few weeks to a month).  Disk performance isn't stellar, but it doesn't suck either.  Much more performant-feeling than a Raspberry Pi.  It's adequate, to make your own personal LAN server, like say OpenMediaVault (for serving SMB file shares), or Nextcloud (DAV file shares, with SSL encryption, work great in Gnome Nautilus out-of-the-box, or Linux Mint's file manager, Nemo, once you install the package "davfs2"). 
 
Small home offices should be a good fit for this kit, where LAN file-share usage day-to-day is light-to-mediumly demanding.
 
What I love about this kit is that the H5 CPU has decent mainline kernel support.  This helps to assure me that this board won't just be a "flash in the pan", and I'll very likely be able to get kernel security updates for at least a few years into the future.
 
I mention this all to underscore my earlier point that to get something minimally sturdy, performant, long-lasting and above all useful in a way that goes beyond a tinkerer's toy (which can be a great starting point for many, don't get me wrong), then to me, this $80 kit is about the lowest I'd personally go.  For $20, I'd rather go eat a pizza or something.

Works in firefox. Even in Armbian. I don't know how. But it does. But Firefox does suck for surfing.
For that I use Vivaldi. There 1/3 lost frames in 1080p Youtube. Chromium 2/3 lost frames. Firefox 0 frames lost. All video works perfect. I even use it as video player on the NanoPi M4.
For me the NanoPi M4 is the perfect 2nd desktop pc. It's very fast. It's got an amazing heatsink. It's stable, haven't had 1 crash with it in hundreds of hours use. I've tried many different sbc's on there desktop capabillity's. The Odroid C2 was the best until the NanoPi M4.
Tinker board does ok in video, but many things don't work. I've tried it again this week, and it even got worse. I need 3 different OS'es to be able to do everything.
To my knowledge not many others than the C2, tinker, rasp and RK3399 have HW acc in Linux. The Raspberry sucks to work with.

Guys, you're going at this all wrong. For desktop use and 20$ best bet for a good experience is a used Dell, HP with a Core2 Duo type cpu. These are plentiful, since businesses get rid of them and you can easily pick one up for 20$ or less if you shop around.
 
It's going to give you much better desktop experience with common apps and OS than any A7 or A53 based SBC (these CPUs are muuuch slower than Core2). If you can spring extra $$$ for a few more gigs of ram (these typically come with either 2 or 4GB of ram) and a 60GB SSD (18$ from aliexpress) you can get a fluid desktop experience for peanuts.

Here my temperatures with a small fan on the underside and some screws to raise it. As tkaiser said. It works better when the fan blows over a larger area. This works good enough.
It's a great heatsink. But the downside is that it heats up the whole board. So I don't think it's healty to constantly run it at 85°C. I've done it for 1h for a test. The board smelled badly. I want do it again. With low loads it doesn't heat up quickly.

Temperature
---------------
Armbian Bionic/Stretch 64-bit 2Ghz + 1.5Ghz
                        With fan idle        36°C
                        With fan maxed   65°C
                        No fan idle           40°C
                        No fan maxed     Throttles at 85°C after 14m30s
                        
Lubuntu armhf/arm64 1.8Ghz + 1.4GHz
                        With fan idle       29°C
                        With fan maxed   54°C
                        No fan idle          42°C
                        No fan maxed     69°C (after 30 minutes maxed)

Thanks for your suggestion, we made a SATA HAT prototype for NanoPi M4, it can connect  with 4x 3.5inch hard drive and work well.
 
 

Armbian is mostly ahead of the upstream kernel releases in board specific functions. Up to about one year. Regarding the biggest group (Allwinner), the only change will be that we will remove a few patches  and when 4.19.y is sorted out it will become our NEXT for A10/A20/H3/H5/H6/A64 and Armada 3700, Rockchip, Meson, ... almost all supported board as a first or second kernel.
 

Count the patches and search for NEO2 there: https://github.com/armbian/build/tree/master/patch/kernel/sunxi-next

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812200061
 

Umm.. the Helios4 kits (full or just the board) come with all the necessary cables.  SATA power, SATA data and AC adapter.   The only thing you need to source yourself is the drives.

Actually the 4.4 kernel is quite stable, however Armbian development on this board is still in early stages, so it's marked as WIP. It means many optimizations may have not been applied yet (e.g. interrupts), and many configurations may be changed later (e.g. board family change requires a manual upgrade). If you are an experienced Linux user, this may not be a problem.
 
There are a few other boards with fast native SATA or capable of PCIe SATA supported by Armbian, e.g. Helios4, EspressoBin, Clearfog Pro.

I'm definitely interested!  I'll be watching this thread in hopes this becomes real.

And guess what: I have a huge box here labeled 'PC-Schraddel' (PC junk), just checked it for those cables and to my surprise I found in there my EspressoBin and also the right cable with 2 female Molex jacks:

The problem with the Molex male power connector was solved with a soldering iron :-)) - the male power connector at the end of a sata power cable was replaced by a female one - a not so difficult task, since the pins can be removed from the female connector.
 
If there is some interest in these enclosures, I will try to find a company to produce and sell them (with an obligation to donate 1 USD/ 1 EUR to Armbian per housing sold). 

Nice. How did you solve the problem of the stupid Molex male power connector? And do you sell these things?

And that's exactly what Armbian is! For someone not familiar with this basics, Armbian take care about it - even if you don't know that this is an issue. It's not that you can't change this behavior and do 'stupid things' with armbian.  But a 'stock' Armbian tries to avoid it.
That's why we should have your essays collected somewhere.  For me the best way would be that they are written somewhere as a 'tutorial'/'education' part.. But links to the forum posts could also work. 
 
For me, Armbian is:
clean Debian/Ubuntu (due to debootstrap processing of rootfs) on top of an enhanced BSP/mainline kernel (due to a bunch of patches) enhanced durability (due to log2ram & longer 'commit interval') one of the few distributions providing kernel updates on 'living systems' for arm boards (which goes sometimes wrong  - but we try to fix it in case it goes wrong, and yes there is some space for improvements) an active community trying to help you when you struggle - even your issue is not Armbian related/ due to lack of (basic) linux knowledge etc.  providing a similar linux experience over different SoCs/'brands' - the reason I'll never take use an image provided by the boardmaker (e.g. friendlyArm) is not because I think all of them do a bad job, it's because I don't want to waste hours of time to figure out where their behavior is different from the images provided by another boardmaker/distribution.   a mighty buildscript which allows the user to fix things on his own (e.g. @TonyMac32 and me try to support CSI for the tinker, we still fail  but the buildscript allows me to create different kernel configs & patches for the kernel/u-boot etc without doing the annoying diff process on my own.. I can simply do my changes inside the sources and as soon as I fixed something I can send a PR to armbian and other people can benefit from my enhancement or in case Armbian doesn't accept the PR I can provide it as an userpatch so that everyone interested in the same 'enhancement' can build it on his own).  I agree that part of the people are ignorant when it comes to durability and 'proper usage' of SBCs. I also agree that user expectations are sometimes ridiculous (I want a 8$ SBC together with a 1$ PSU and a 2$ SD-card and I expect desktop performance when it's about multimedia stuff with linux! ). I'm not sure if this is the majority, I guess that there's a 'silent majority' of users which are happy with what Armbian offers to them.  Normally you don't register to a Forum just to say "Awsome! Thank you for providing an reliable Debian/Ubuntu for my *random SBC*!" It's more than you register cause you something doesn't work as expected, cause it doesn't boot anymore or cause you bought a new SBC which is not supported (yet) by Armbian. 
As a moderator here, I get all these reminders to approve new forum postings and therefore I read a bunch of them... Some of them are funny, some of them are stupid a few of them are obviously spam but even less of them are 'impressive'. The last one I can remember was when @konsgn posted his first post where he nailed down the OPi0 thermal issue with his first post. So why did he wrote this here and not in Xunlongs forum (in case you did, mea culpa for my low google-fu , I only found it here)? Maybe he's one of the 'silent' users which are (mostly) happy with what armbian offers to them, maybe cause he thought it make sense to share it in an active community - I don't know but it seems we are a good place for sharing such informations..  
 
We can provide those informations in a 'marketing manner' and I'm sure @zador.blood.stained wouldn't be happy when we do it this way.  We can do it the way we do it at the moment, explaining the same questions again and again (and again ) to our 'customers'  or we can try to collect them so that they are accessible 'as easy as possible'. 

I would call the price/performance not good but simply awesome today given we get ultra performant cards like the 32GB SanDisk Ultra A1 for as low as 12 bucks currently: https://www.amazon.com/Sandisk-Ultra-Micro-UHS-I-Adapter/dp/B073JWXGNT/ (I got mine 2 weeks ago for 13€ at a local shop though). And the A1 logo is important since cards compliant to A1 performance class perform magnitudes faster with random IO and small blocksizes (which pretty much describes the majority of IO happening with Linux on our boards).
 
As can be seen in my '2018 A1 SD card performance update' the random IO performance at small blocksizes is magnitudes better compared to an average/old/slow/bad SD card with low capacity:
average 4GB card SanDisk Ultra A1 1K read 1854 3171 4K read 1595 2791 16K read 603 1777 1K write 32 456 4K write 35 843 16K write 2 548 With pretty common writes at 4K block size the A1 SanDisk shows 843 vs. 35 IOPS (IO operations per second) and with 16K writes it's 548 vs. 2 IOPS. So that's over 20 or even 250 times faster (I don't know the reason but so far all average SD cards I tested with up to 8 GB capacity show this same weird 16KB random write bottleneck -- even those normal SanDisk Ultra with just 8GB). This might be one of the reasons why 'common knowledge' amongst SBC users seems to be trying to prevent writing to SD card at all. Since the majority doesn't take care which SD cards they use, test them wrongly (looking at irrelevant sequential transfer speeds instead of random IO and IOPS) and chose therefore pretty crappy ones.
 
BTW: the smallest A1 rated cards available start with 16GB capacity. But for obvious reasons I would better buy those with 32GB or even 64GB: price/performance ratio is much better and it should be common knowledge that buying larger cards 'than needed' leads to SD cards wearing out later.
 

IMO "linux-firmare" in Ubuntu based images should be installed by default as it contains firmware for popular wireless and multimedia devices. Solving random firmware related problems is a complicated task for our user base.

I completely agree. I think, if a desire to be more minimalist exists, that we create those images specifically labelled as such, for devices that fit the case (OPi IoT, nanopi NEO, Duo, etc).  Otherwise I don't see the value.
 
My honest reaction to the discussion is that it fits perfectly with the "What is Armbian?" discussion.  I don't think playing games to save a few megabytes fits something we really care about, it isn't really our problem if an extreme subset of users wants to pull the 512 MB SD card out of their 10 year old Sandisk Sansa MP3 player and want to put Linux on it...
 
There are 2 main deliverables that I see:  A build system for people to make their flavor of Debian for their needs, and our pre-packaged images.  IMHO, if we want to make it more "lean", this can be an option available in the build system deliverable, and if we want to make questionably valuable tiny images, then we can do that in parallel with the current desktop and server images.

As a dev I vote to keep the dev packages in. Sure is nice to have the build tools (even git client) installed even if things like libtool and pkg-config are missing from the base. If you are going for a minimal install I understand stripping all this stuff out, but I'm not sure how important it is to have a 700K vs 1.6 G image in today's terms. As @tkaiser points out most people have moved on beyond 4G SD cards. I've been using 32G for years and the price/performance is good for what I need it for.
 
I've have some home made security cameras that write/read/delete 100s of movies and images a day 24/7 for years without failure. I realize there may be more intensive usages scenarios (more write intensive), but at the current pricing levels I'll toss the SD out every few years if I have to. As with all things the lowest common denominator or race to the bottom isn't always the best strategy. Stability and standardization are more important to me then a little extra RAM, a little more SD life, etc. Not that these are not important, but the bigger picture I think is more important to focus on.