Anybody play with Raspberry Pi's?

[Tracy]

I use two of them for my telescope control (RPi 4's, one with 4GB and the other with 8GB RAM and 512GB SD cards).
They have gotten to be two things recently:
expensive
hard to find in stock

So, I recently ordered an Orange Pi 3 LTS (2GB) and it finally arrived from the slow boat from China (been about 2 months waiting).
It's been a REAL trip with it. It ships with a version of Android on the built in 8GB EEMC and you can also add an SD-Card and run from it by default.
The Android is basically useless for me, and it's not easy to replace.... so SD-Card installs it is. Spent over 8 hours today fiddling around with Debian (think it was Buster) for the ARM chipset.... installed fine, connected to the desktop fine, but once you put TightVNC on, you could no longer log in. After getting tired, I tried Ubuntu Jammy on it and had it up and running (with VNC working) in about 15 minutes. Now I'm burning all the astronomy stuff to it.

The nice thing.... I only paid something like $59 shipped for it (had a case included) and to get an equivalent RPi 3 B board, it's about $120 with no case. The one benefit the RPi has is one more USB 2.0 port, but the chipset is actually slower than the Orange Pi.