For this(and other) reason, the Asus Tinker Board looks like the superior choice, for very little more money than the Pi3:

https://www.asus.com/uk/Single-Board-Computer/Tinker-Board/

The last time I checked out the Asus Tinker it was still suffering from horrendous software support and cost nearly twice as much in the UK (which it still does, £32 vs £55). So unless you NEED those extra features, I strongly disagree.

I bought one and played with it over the holidays and there are a ton of OS options now. There's Armbian support now, which wasn't around at first, and it seems to be very stable and feature complete. The board is significantly more powerful than a Pi 3 with emulators and compiling and just about everything.

I had so many problems with Tinker OS and I wasn't the only one. Never tried Armbian so maybe it's better, how's the graphics performance with that?

You can actually boot Raspbian (or probably any other ARM OS) on Asus Tinkerboard - you only need to copy some files to /boot (including kernel) from TinkerOS and several kilobytes of bootloader after partition table.

(That way you can prepare image that boots both on RPi and Tinkerboard)

That sounds cool! Does the tinker board hdmi/audio work when booting raspbian?

HDMI works (only kernel support and xserver-xorg-video-fbdev for Xorg is required), I haven't tested audio.

Example hybrid image for Tinkerboard and RPi is here (based on Ubuntu): https://files.husarion.com/husarion-core2-ros.img.xz (unfortunately the build scripts are not public yet)

I can vouch. As of November 2017, software support was still pretty rough.

ROCK64!

http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/ROCK64_Main_Page

4 gigabytes of LPDDR3. USB 3. GbE. eMMC. Onboard SPI flash. Unfortunately Mali GPU, but lima is actively developed now…

yes! for headless/server type applications I think this is the sweet spot right now. In the US, Ameridroid is faster than ordering direct from pine64 (in my experience).

The biggest downside for me is Rock64 doesn't have an OS with the pedigree of Raspbian. I'm running the 'ayufan' minimal ubuntu xenial, and it seems solid. but when I've played around with a monitor in the full xenial build I've seen some crashes and lockups.

Is there a stable Os for it that gets timely security patches etc? (Not that Raspbian does too well here either..)

Arch Linux ARM! https://github.com/m01/rock64-arch-linux-build (it's literally generic aarch64 arch, no more "for this board")

and really any Linux distro can be installed like that

+ "soon", FreeBSD (possible to boot already, but very few drivers have been already written https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arm/2018-Februar...)

Yeah, although adding usable wireless is a big bonus - I wish it had 2-4GB of RAM and I wish you could put the USB ports into gadget mode like you can with the zero, but preferably at least two or more ports that can work with it. Also - I’m really disappointed there’s still no GbE.

The 3B+ has GbE, though bottlenecked by USB 2.

Or even 4G. Would be nice to have a high-memory variant especially seeing that that would require zero changes in the OS unlike most othet hardware variations.

As far as I can remember, the system-on-chip architecture limits the maximum amount of RAM to 1 GB (I'll try and find an official source, it's probably somewhere in the BCM283x peripherals documentation).

Not to say Broadcom couldn't spin a newer revision of the SoC with a different internal architecture, but for now it seems that >1 GB of RAM would require substantially more effort than just swapping the DRAM module on the board.

Right, RAM is part of the SoC... that probably makes the idea pretty much a no-go.

The RAM was only integrated on the SoC on earlier models (called a package-on-package, PoP -- see https://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware#Components)

Later versions (I think starting with RPi 2) have a separate DRAM chip on the bottom side of the PCB.

Agreed. I would have liked to see an updated video core. A Vulkan announcement would have been big news.

For network applications the improved networking speeds are far more important.