Software
In the software area, Orange Pi offers images of Debian Bookworm and Ubuntu Jammy, along with Android, which we did not evaluate. Based on our testing, the performance is good and not as sluggish as we initially expected. Concerning memory resources, we received a sample with 4GB of RAM and found that approximately 2.9GB of RAM was available. Lastly, please remember that if you intend to run memory-intensive services in the background, this figure is likely to change.
Debian Bookworm Desktop XFCE is running under Linux kernel version 6.6.98.
root@orangepizero3w:~# free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3931424 945220 2062624 76776 1043752 2986204
Swap: 1965708 0 1965708| Metric | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Total RAM | 3,931,424 kB | Physical memory installed |
| Used RAM | 945,220 kB | Memory is actively used by processes. |
| Free RAM | 2,062,624 kB | Completely unused memory |
| Shared Memory | 76,776 kB | Memory shared between processes (e.g., tmpfs) |
| Buffers/Cache | 1,043,752 kB | RAM used for filesystem caching; freed when needed |
| Available RAM | 2,986,204 kB | Estimated memory available without swapping |
| Total Swap | 1,965,708 kB | Swap space allocated |
| Used Swap | 0 kB | No swap usage — good performance |
| Free Swap | 1,965,708 kB | All swap space is unused. |
Debian Bookworm Desktop with XFCE (Screenshots)
According to its user manual (PDF created 2026-05-15 11:18:04) GPU and video encoding/decoding units are only supported by “Debian bullseye” – which was released 2021, is in LTS with EOL August 2026 (this month, as of writing). In other words, OrangePI have released a device that had two months (2!) OS support left.
If its that critical, you can always use the Armbian image, or buy a pi board for 140-200$. its not that the software
is useless and cannot be updated.