Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13456357

The problem I have with these boards that pop up is that they get announced, they aren't quite compatible with the popular alternative (the Raspberry Pi), so you buy one and it ends up sitting in a shelf somewhere. I still remember the whole Intel Edison disaster.

These days, the primary decider of which board I'll use is how big the ecosystem is. The Raspberry Pi ecosystem (as well as the Arduino ecosystem) is huge, so that's definitely a big plus. Other alternatives, for example the ESP8266, that are compatible with the "big player" (in this case the Arduino), get this advantage for free.

Exactly.

Also, this new board is a bit too expensive IMO.

the ESP8266, when it came out, was more proposed to be used together with an Arduino. Only after people made it run arduino sketches on its own, it became compatible.

There isn't a lack of RPi-like SBCs, so Asus needs to do serious amount of PR and have persistence for long-term presence to stand out.

Here is a random recent list of 90 different competitors: http://linuxgizmos.com/table-compares-90-hacker-friendly-sin...

What's the mainline kernel support situation for this SoC? If not mainline support, what's the kernel security update story?

Doesn't look like there's a real time clock and accompanying battery, like most other boards like this. I wonder why that's left out? It can't cost that much to add and seems pretty important.

The raspberry pi and beaglebone black don't have one either. This one does have on board wifi and gigabit Ethernet.

This, minus HDMI, plus POE, and I'd be in swoon city.

I see online many negative comments about Rockchip, anyone have numbers or know how Rockchip would affect development, compared to a RPi?

Since I've moved to an all-Kodi household, this is definitely interesting to me.

So ARMv7-A is still, like, a thing?

It's hard to beat at that gate count.