Did I completely brick my Orange Pi 5 plus by trying to update kernel?

Which ones did you install in particular? Indeed we have none on our server for legacy-rk35xx, currently.

I just checked the current-rockchip64 (which you probably installed), but it has no device tree for Orange Pi 5 Plus.

Was there a particular reason why you wanted to update the kernel? I aim to switch to Linux 6.1 soon, could do that for next DietPi release. Note that we would always install newer kernels hosted on our server on next DietPi update, at least all from here outside of the testing sub directory.

If you did not manually purge the old kernel packages, you should be able to revert to that one from another Linux system:

  • Plug + mount the SD card
  • Replace the Image, uInitrd and dtb symlinks within the /boot directory, which should point to current-rockchip64-ending files/dirs, with ones which point to the related legacy-rk35xx-ending files/dirs.