I seem to remember playing with a few different distros back then, one called pygmy Linux, one was Slackware, then I gave up and stayed with Windows for a while. Debian or a Debian derivative seem to be my current favorite, but I honestly have no idea what derivative those Orange Pis are running. All I know--and all I care about--is that OctoPrint runs and runs well headless.

When you look at the guys like Raymond Chen talking about the history of Windows, they were really experts in eeking out performance. If faulting on an invalid instruction was the fastest way out of one mode into another, that's what they did.

Can you run at a lower resolution and more colors? Sometimes that was the trade off.