I am new to Ambian and am trying to boot up to it for the first time. I have both an Orange Pi 6 Plus and an Orange Pi Zero 3. Using the Armbian Imager, I had no problem finding the images recomended for my units. My problem is that neither of the devices can boot up to the desktop. 

They will boot up to a text console where I can configure Wifi, root password, intitial user name, and locale. After that, they state that they are starting the desktop  or running some script and continue no further. That I see uniform and reliable failure across the images and the devices make me think that I may be doing something wrong. But I cannot find some step documented somewhere that I am missing. 

 

I am using a power supply that is also branded Orange Pi capable of up to 100 watts on both units. I am able to run other OS images on both units, but not Armbian. Is there some trick or additional step that is required for these to successfully boot up? 

 

Images tried on the Zero 3:

• Armbian 26.11.0 XFCE
• Armbian 26.11.0 Minimal

Images tried on the 6 plus:

• Armbian 26.8.3 Minimal
• Armbian 26.8.3 GNOME
• Armbian 26.8.3 KDE

The identical failure across two boards with nothing in common except the SD card is the tell here. RK3588S and H618 share no kernel, no GPU driver, no display stack — but they do share the first-boot procedure, and that's the most I/O-heavy moment in the whole process: the rootfs gets resized, SSH keys regenerate, caches build. One detail worth noticing: even the Minimal image "failed" on your Zero 3, and Minimal has no desktop to start — so what's hanging is likely the first-boot stage itself, not the desktop. A slow or counterfeit card dies exactly there. They often benchmark fine sequentially and crawl on the small random writes first boot does, so a "fast" card can still be the culprit. Give it a genuine 10-15 minutes watching the activity LED (regular bursts = still working; long dead silence = stuck), and if possible try a known-good name-brand card written with the imager's verify pass enabled.

The working text console is your diagnostic window. When it stalls, log in from there and pull journalctl -b for the display manager and dmesg for the tail end — mmc I/O errors confirm the card theory, while a drm or GPU oops on the 6 Plus would point at the graphics side instead. Post those two outputs and the next step usually becomes obvious. Since other OSes run fine, the hardware is almost certainly healthy — this smells like media and first-boot timing rather than a board fault.