Raspberry Pi is actively preventing enthusiasts from upgrading soldered memory to a larger configuration even when the replacement chip is technically compatible. The company says the restriction is intended to discourage unofficial high-capacity resales.
I have to disagree. They are better hardware with way worse software support. Pi’s one big selling point is how out of the box friendly they are, meanwhile getting an orange pi flashed and booting Linux is an interesting experience using a Chinese flash writer with no English translation (back when I tried an orange pi 4).
You can flash them with whatever usb imager or dd? Like there is close to zero effort required and they are somewhat supported by armbian.
You can just use the Armbian flasher. I have an orange pi 5 plus and a Radxa rock 5-itx, and that’s what I’ve done with both.
you can also use the raspberry pi flasher, ironically.