Debian Bullseye & RockPro64: No tty consoles?

[TRS-80]

The only real advantage of a 'pure' Ubuntu or Debian O/S, in my view, is the simplicity in updating your kernel from the common Ubuntu (or Debian) repositories, whereas Armbian requires specialized ones for that purpose. Sometimes I have to wonder if it's such a big deal considering what's being accomplished.

Armbian require custom kernels precisely because of all those low level hardware/kernel differences I mentioned. And I already came to same conclusion you hint at in your last sentence, which is why I have become such a big fan (and supporter) of the project.

I suppose now might be a good time to discuss difference between "legacy" and "mainline" at least from Armbian perspective.

The former are what gets thrown over the wall from the manufacturer upon release. lol Often on some old kernel, include proprietary stuff, however graphics and things like that will work "out of the box."

OTOH, "mainline" is mostly (if not completely) using stuff that, as the name suggests, is getting mainlined in Linux. So it may start off initially less functional, but after a while it gets better, and certainly has the most guarantee of future / longer term support. Some times things requiring lots of proprietary blobs (graphics) don't work as well (for some period of time). This is why Armbian was much more prominent on headless SBC running as servers for the longest time. And only recently got bigger into desktop / graphics stuff, as the F/LOSS stack around graphics especially have matured a great deal over the last several years. Only recently Armbian actually began releasing flashable pre-compiled desktop images.