Some guy talking about porting fedora support to it, so no, you wouldn't have to do any of this.
I probably blew a hundred hours of weekends and weeknights to get 50 minutes of run time out of my machine and something like five people benefited from it.
When Apple came out with a 13" laptop that was less than a pound heavier (with the real battery, not that shitty fake one that was 90 minutes of run time) and happened to run a video game I was interested in, I said screw this and jumped ship.
And suddenly I understood those guys who had been showing up to tech meetups for a year or two with MacBooks. I can spend all my time futzing with my machine like a classic car aficionado, or I can get out and enjoy doing things with it. Once I realized that I had never actually wanted to learn Linux, I just wanted to use it to learn other things, I couldn't go back.
I still occasionally maintain Linux boxes, and sometimes bash, find or sed is the answer to a problem, but with the exception of Docker you literally have to pay me to use it.
He's not a clueless, random noobie. ;)
But what the fuck do I do with it? No one's out there writing software for your obscure embedded-systems evaluation board. There's no pre-packaged SD images out there to let me play with different OSes. There's no ecosystem of cool plug-in hardware to play with and do fun things with.
The cool thing about the RPi is not just the card itself or how cheap it is, it's all the stuff around it.
Some guy ranting about how it's not as cool and open as this random board GPX5-3520-V2-a from Hardware Maker In China I've Never Heard Of that I'll have to hand port and code every piece of software for, is the same blind category error that Slashdotter types have been making for years about Linux.
Your magic "open" box doesn't mean shit if there's nothing I can do with it.