Comment by bayindirh

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.