How to get started?

[GSam]

 Can I use the same image I loaded to the USB drive for my desktop?  Or is the image we download from you specifically made to run on Pine?

And no, you can't [use] the USB for your PC ubuntu to load ubuntu onto the pine64 - they are not compatible. It would be like trying to load the x86 ubuntu onto a PowerPC (Apple) computer - it just will not work. 

The image that you load on your SD card must be an Arm binary specifically for arm64. While you can run arm32 it is not recommended.

A binary image for any other processor type will not work;  including x86, PPC, iOS, and others.  

Having clarified that a bit;  the main point of my addition here is that you can build images for the pine board ( arm64 ) by cross-compiling. You can build the image on an x86 machine to create an arm64 binary !  Other OS(s) can be used for cross-compile too. 

But, if you download an image for the pine board it needs to be an arm64 ( processor type ) image !

   clear as mud ?

Yes.  Makes sense.  I've ordered a new SD card and started to put a new WinIoT image on it.  This card is 128GB Class 10.  I see youtube videos of people with a Ubuntu desktop that I can't seem to find.  That was my alternative to WinIoT.  I'm about ready to give up on Win.  I just can't get it to work at all.  No matter which image I load to the SD card, I always get errors on boot up.  The last cryptic error I got was "IF IRQ NOT LESS".  Do I need to just break down and BUY an image ready SD card from PINE.  I thought I was a computer professional, but I may have to go back to Legos after this.

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I have another thought.  My real goal is to use the Pine in my electronics lab as a bench mounted PC so I can look up reference material stored on my network, access YouTube videos, and use an Internet Explorer to access the online resources I need.  I have a 15.6 laptop LED panel.  I want to mount both on an articulating arm.  My thought was the Pine was perfect for this application because it's compact.  I hoped to use WinIoT because I thought the networking and shared folder requirements would be easier to manage in a Windows environment.  I may be wrong.  Can you tell me which image would be the most "stable", and fast to use that allows me: Internet access with a YouTube and Flash compatible browser, access to shared network resources with secure access (user and password), and open and view Excel, Word, and PDF documents.