Raspberry Pi Perils

For context, I've been posting little updates on projects I've been working on in regards to my raspberry pi boards, my newest addition being a first generation Raspberry Pi Zero. No wifi or bluetooth, just pure computational anemia lol.

My main project with this board is to see how far I can get using it as a desktop machine. Not for any practical reason, just curiosity.

I've had some success with DietPi, a very lightweight Debian distro for lower end ARM machines, much like the Gen One Pi Zero. It's pretty speedy, about as speedy as a Pi 0 can get, and runs OK with LXQt installed.

My main issue is that trying to run anything graphical outside of Root seems to be a bit of a pain that I do not wanna put up with, so instead I'm using Raspberry Pi OS Lite.

I don't know if there's a bug with the Pi Imager software or something, but no matter what, after flashing the Raspberry Pi OS image, it always seems to forget the password. Like, not matter what I do, it says the password is wrong. I have tried multiple Raspi OS versions, the default, full and lite, flashed them each multiple times making sure the password and username are correct, even using different machines to flash the SD card, but it always says the password is wrong.

Getting this thing to act as a desktop is a nightmare before you even get to the desktop at all it seems lol. I'll figure it out eventually, but oh boy, I was not expecting such a little board to put up a fight like that.