Comment by Aurornis
> I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering
Raspberry Pi is an interesting example because it is constantly criticized by people who complain about the closed source blobs, the non-open schematics, and other choices that don’t appease the purists.
Yet it does a great job at letting users do what they want to do with it, which is get to using it. It’s more accessible than the open counterparts, more available, has more guides, and has more accessories.
The situation has a lot of parallels to why people use Windows instead of seeking alternatives: It’s accessible, easy, and they can focus on doing what they want with the computer.
The problems with SBCs are primarily software. I have a ton of SBCs, mostly Raspberry Pis and OrangePis.
OrangePi boards are great. Zero is almost stamp sized, plus and pro has tons of options and on-board NVMe + fast-ish eMMC with great official cases, whatnot.
But, guess what? The OS is bad. I mean, unpatched, mishmashed, secured as an open door bad.
You get an OS installation which drops you to root terminal automatically on terminal output. There are many services which you don't need on board. There's an image, not an installer, and all repositories look to Chinese servers.
Armbian is not a good solution, because it's not designed to rollover like Debian and RasberryPi OS. So you can't build any long-term system from them like you can build with RaspberryPi.
On top of that, you can't boot anything mainline on most of them because either drivers are closed source, or the Kernel has weird hacks to make things work, or generally both.
So, what makes Raspberry Pi is not the hardware, but software support.