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I just started playing with my Tinker Board S. I installed the latest Tinker OS but it doesn't seem to work that well.
Updating the packages causes Chromium to stop working (downgrading fixed this) and Firefox doesn't start at all.
Which OS is recommended around here? Are there other OSs that are known to be more stable than Tinker OS?
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On top of my mind, Armbian is a good substitute.
As per your interest to have a GUI, better to chose the desktop version.
But I would say that at the eve of the second year from the debut, the software doesn't meet the hardware. In particular for the device-tree which lacks of descriptions and wireless devices that still in staging development.
Chromium it's better to keep the one that came from the installation image. Further upgrades are likely failing, as you might read over the forum.
Light blue words might be a link. Have you try to click on them? 
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> Chromium it's better to keep the one that came from the installation image. Further upgrades are likely failing, as you might read over the forum.
Chromium on Armbian should survive the upgrade. At least if next upstream upgrade is not broken too.
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Great, I guess I'll check out Armbian! Are you aware of any disadvantages of Armbian over Tinker OS?
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Multimedia features in Armbian are not installed by default. If you need them:
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/7262-rk3...ng-script/
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It reads as if Armbian plus that script will give me a system that's better in every way than Tinker OS.
I guess I'll just switch to Armbian if that's the case.
What about the official Android image? Does it also suffer from obvious problems?
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What is herein stated is just personal impressions, so feel free to try all available installation and then make your own conclusions.
After all you might try one each day, so at the end of the week you'll judge what is most suitable for your own needs. BTW, it's free
with a little cost of the internet connection.
Light blue words might be a link. Have you try to click on them?
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Yes, you're right, although I do think that Tinker OS is really obviously problematic as 'apt update && apt dist-upgrade' currently breaks applications that are installed by default. I would expect such obvious issues to be solved faster or to be non-existent.
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Ah my bad, somehow I completely overlooked the post that this is an upstream Debian issue. It makes me wonder about Firefox though. Is upstream Debian just badly tested compared to Raspbian/Armbian?
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I found a way to get Firefox to work in Tinker OS. I disabled all the repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list and instead added this line:
deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian stretch main contrib non-free
Then I did:
sudo apt install firefox-esr
This gives me a working Firefox! I haven't tried installing a newer Chromium yet from the Raspbian repositories this way, but I think I'll just experiment a bit and see how this goes
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