I've seen enough quirks so far on this orange pi 4 LTS that I think it merits its own guide. (OK, so maybe one killer quirk, but even so.
Mine is a 3gb RAM with 16gb EMMC.
It comes with android on the EMMC, and is supposed to boot to sd instead if one is in . . . and thus the hair pulling began.
I downloaded both raspbian and ubuntu server for ARM, and flashed onto a variety of cards with the raspbian tool.
in each case, it booted from android anyway.
I even tried raw writing with dd, and got the same results.
It took a few days of futilely trying various fora (the manufacturer's own takes three or four days to get an account approved, and is a spam wasteland) before I ventured to try Arabian, because, well, why not?
their site suggested balenaEtcher, so I downloaded that and the Arabian image. They actually have a specific image for the orange pi 4 LTS!
Initially, the etcher would not take the images. I had downloaded with safari (osX), and it was apparently unpacking the image.
So I copied the link and used wget to download.
so I flashed, put it in, and it simply came up in armbian!
curious, I flashed ubuntu onto the same chip with the etcher, and it still wouldn't work, so back to armbian.
(I'm actually agnostic as to linux distros; I initially chose based on what the bulk of people here seem to use, as there will be more collective experience).
so the lessons so far:
1) use armbian
2) use balenaEtcher
3) don't use safari to download.