but how do I run it on confusingly named chinese sbc's for which the only os images that seem to exist are an untrustworthy debian based system and an old version of android?
I figured as much. These are things that were given to me as an "otherwise it goes in the landfill" package deal. a couple have klipper over dietpi for my 3d printers but the rest are seemigly junk and I'll probbaly toss them in the electronics section at the recycle depot next time I go there
Ah, well in that case, fair enough.
I've done my fair share of ridiculousness to keep free crappy hardware running.
I will say, try running Alpine Linux on a container.
I've managed to extract some usefulness out of a borderline e-waste Android tablet running some flavor of Jelly Bean, so outdated you couldn't connect to most websites due to bad TLS certs, by running a Alpine Container on it.
Alpine was the only distro I found that could run up-to-date software on such a ancient version of the Linux kernel, everything else failed to work at all.
yeah I think I have an orange, a mango, a nanopi, and a couple entirely written in chinese that are different from each other. Just before reddit went senile I was planning on posting images to try to ID the unknown ones but I didn't and got busy with stuff less likely to be a dead end.
Can anyone confirm if it is indeed the case that you can't just put whatever os you want on these things, or if it is possible by jumping through some hoops that google would never show me in favour of showing me other shit that makes them more money?