Sure, my experience with custom kernels or the suggested Ubuntu version were totally frustrating as well. I would stay away from these. However, ARMBIAN is stable and the board becomes fully usable.

Looks promising but lacks official support from ARMBIAN, which was crucial for choosing the espressobin.

With ARMBIAN I keep updating the kernel without any problems.

Totally agree. The espressobin community has been very active for a while, but documentation is lacking even for basic functionalities like GPIO pinout usage.

Haven't tried myself, but there's a thread discussing this: forum.level1techs.com/t/firewall-on-espressobin/131206/9