I’ve used the RockPi-S for a project a while ago. The software to write to the on-board storage was in Chinese. Without any way to turn it off, I had to hold my phone with Google Translate in front of the screen to navigate around it, although that might have been the least unintuitive part of the software. The alternative cli-software refused to compile at first and then refused to use the forwarded USB device. I ended up booting Fedora on my work laptop just to run it.

I recommend trying out Armbian if you still have problems with it. The images provided by them are significantly more reliable, I haven’t had any issues, while some official images failed to boot. Also avoid the models with on-board storage, just use an SD card, it really isn’t worth the hassle.