oh, also, 'armbian-config' successfully installed /boot to eMMC and / to NVMe on the NanoPi, which is nice. it's only an x1 NVMe M.2 slot, but 512GB is a lot bigger (and probably still faster) than the 32GB eMMC.
anyway, since I nuked it once already today, I'm gonna install Armbian again from scratch and see how LXQt performs, I like that environment better than Xfce. (I knew Xfce wasn't spelled with all-caps)