It's always better than a link in the sticky post on the manufacturer's phpbb forum. I bought some audio equipment directly from a Chinese company, and everything look like a hobbies/student project.

> "Chinese repos" is a very charitable interpretation of the Google drive links they used to distribute the os.

"Chinese repos" refer to the fact that the debian repos links for updates point to custom Huawei servers.

> it often didn't work because it tripped the maximum downloads per month limit.

it always work if you login into a Google account prior to downloading. If you don't, indeed the downloads will regularly fail.