This is a collection of random tidbits regarding peculiarities of this image and hardware.
First boot might take a little while (though not minutes), there's a rootfs
growing initramfs hook running called resizerootfs that you can disable after
first boot with sudo chmod -x /etc/initramfs-tools/hooks/resizerootfs && sudo update-initramfs -u.
Username pleb with password pleb, you will be immediately prompted to change
your password the moment you log in.
If you want to get graphics acceleration, you must use Wayland. Panfrost is not really tested on X11. You can still run X11 applications through XWayland.
As for how to install the Wayland versions of various desktop environments, please consult the Debian wiki.
(For Plasma, remember to choose "Wayland" on the bottom left on the login screen!)
To get a better experience in Firefox, you'll want to run it with
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1. Export that in some script that gets run, e.g. on Plasma,
a script in ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/.
You'll then want to force WebRender on in about:config, but I forgor 💀 how to
do that.
Generally, the usual apt update && apt upgrade will work. Occasionally
however, manual intervention is required. In such cases, please consult
UPGRADING.md.
Here are some known limitations of either software or hardware you should know about before scratching your head for hours trying to figure out what's wrong.
Due to a hardware bug involving the shared signal lines for SATA and USB 3 on Quartz64 Model A, only very short USB 3 cables will work, and some devices may not work at all. It's due to signalling problems. A revised Model A that gets rid of the SATA port to fix this issue will be manufactured eventually.
Only a select few display output modes work, among them 1080p60. A notable absence is 4K; your 4K monitor will likely just fall back to its 1080p mode. This is a limitation of the mainline kernel's HDMI driver for the Rockchip platforms, and needs consideration for older (buggier) Rockchip boards before it can be fixed.
Only the Hantro hardware block in the RK3566 is active in mainline right now, as we do not yet have a driver for rkvdec2. This means that while you get VP8, MPEG-2 and H.264 (up to 1080p) decode acceleration, 4K H.264, VP9 and HEVC are still missing.
The API the hardware decoding uses is v4l2-requests. This is a fairly new API with limited userspace support. GStreamer has support for it, but FFmpeg does not yet have upstream code to utilise it. Notably, this means that opening a YouTube video in your web browser while looking at your CPU usage in a task manager is not a proper way to evaluate whether hardware decoding is working, as browsers do not yet support this API.
Plebian (or Debian, for that matter) does not yet properly package the wireless firmware needed for the SOQuartz's Wi-Fi chip. Therefore, Wi-Fi won't work out of the box on SOQuartz, but it will work on Model B.
This section lists articles about Plebian by various other sources that may be worth looking into if you're looking for information on how to use your system.
Documentation on how to use device tree overlays on Plebian, to interface with e.g. "maker" sensors.
This article goes in-depth about how to use Plebian on a Quartz64 Model A to set up a NAS.