i use orangepi prime boards in production as remote NIDS. i used Armbian (a great debian porting project that does what the maker should have done ) until orange released their Debian 10 img. I put an endurance rated sdcard in those pis and they run like the little pink bunny! Love these little orangepis. I have tried a handful of other boards ( beagle, raspberry, banana , have a whole stack. too many to remember) but the oranges are solid. On a lot of these little SoCs, you can use the raspberry pi gpio software since many of these boards follow the same gpio standard & plug in/out.