I think the RPi is more of a jack of all trades, master of none. This also applies to performance. It bundles an impressive amount of partially niche, but overa

I think the RPi is more of a jack of all trades, master of none. This also applies to performance. It bundles an impressive amount of partially niche, but overall well supported, features (Linux, USB3, gigabit ethernet, okish wifi & BT, HDMI with CEC, GPIO, camera, okish GPU) with a powerful enough CPU and enough RAM for an acceptable price. If you want the traditional desktop experience or a higher workload server, the RPi is likely not going to win against an N100 SBC or mini PC. For many applications besides that the RPi fits the niche of powerful enough to run it, power efficient enough to not worry about it running all the time, cheap enough to not worry too much and common enough to be well supported. Things like single-purpose software packages/distributions are often better supported on an RPi, just because it has become the "standard". Sure, you might find hardware better suited for each use case, but it seems like the RPi can handle most of it and thus becomes the default choice. As an example, I recently tried out an N100 mini PC to drive my living room TV instead of an RPi4. I liked the option of having a fully featured desktop with decent performance just in case (most importantly Firefox). Plus the N100 on paper has more video decoding options, either via HW decoders or just by virtue of handling more via software decoding. In practice, these advantages were irrelevant for my primary use case (watch movies, series & long-form YT videos). But, I lost out on "it just works" features. The RPi4 just boots into Kodi (via LibreELEC) and works flawlessly with HDMI CEC, the N100 does not have any CEC capability (missing HW feature). Sure, I can use an external USB dongle to get CEC support, but after buying that I am at a far higher price than for the RPi4 + SD card + good power supply + simple case. Side note: the RPi4 also beat a Pine64+ for that use case, just because I couldn't get the board to play nice with LibreELEC. No CEC and no wifi, even after tinkering for far too long.