There are also Intel based boards. Apologies for sounding like an ad. I am a big fan of the upboard which starts at $90 and goes up if you add more RAM and st

There are also Intel based boards. Apologies for sounding like an ad. I am a big fan of the upboard which starts at $90 and goes up if you add more RAM and storage. They also have a 40 pin connector that is the same as the raspberry pi. It uses a 64 bit Atom chip, and performs surprisingly well. (There is a but coming.) It just works with standard AMD64 Linux distros and uses UEFI. You can grab any of the Ubuntu / Redhat / Fedora / Arch etc installers and they just work. You can use the mainstream kernel and it works. The GPU is a standard Intel one and just works. BUT if you want to use some of the 40 pin connector then you will need some kernel patches. Under the hood the Atom runs at 1.8v but the rpi pins are at 3.3v. Consequently there is a piece of level shifter hardware that does the voltage translation, but needs to know which direction the pins are being using for (like the raspberry pi, you can change this at runtime). The kernel patches make that work. There are more if you care - eg you can make the enumeration order of i2c & spi etc match the same as the raspberry pi. Storage is embedded emmc (ie no need for sdcards), and I don't know what they did, but it is really fast. CPU performance seems to be about double that of the Odroid XU4 for each core in my workloads. Having a standard (for AMD64) boot process is great - the various ARM devices in this space are all over the map.