> even though the specs may beat a rasperry the software eco system is worth a lot too Yes. In Fred Brooks Mythical Man-Month terms, the RPi is a software syst

> even though the specs may beat a rasperry the software eco system is worth a lot too Yes. In Fred Brooks Mythical Man-Month terms, the RPi is a software system product (with awful hardware), whereas OEM would-be competitors like this are just software (i.e. hobby projects). They might work for the authors most of the time, but they probably won't work for your use case without a large investment of time. Not even if you work in the same company. Partial exception made for Armbian supported boards here. They are getting part of the way to RPi in terms of system quality on much more limited resources. (Of course both RPi and Armbian depend on the huge amount of work embodied in Debian.) The software and documentation ecosystem is more important than the hardware, in the end.