I've played some with those and it's not pretty. It's all the pain you get with commercial SBCs except: even less support, much lower quality hardware, and terrible thermal solutions (ventilation holes under the case with no feet and tiny/non-existent heatsinks).

In the end what killed my interest in them is that the cheapest you can get those is like 30 USD and for that price you can also get X86 thin clients that are just better in every single way.

Still, if you want to get your feet wet I suggest you start with RK3318. Those boards are much harder to brick than AmLogic and are the only ones with at least some support from Armbian: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/17597-csc-armbian-for-rk3318...