I don’t understand why other boards can’t get themselves fully on the Linux mainline, that would take away at least a part of the rPi advantage. There are still a lot of limitations there relative to an x86 computer, although I’m not clear how much those are limitations of the Linux Arm ecosystem, and how much those are to do with the lack of mainline support, the need for blob drivers etc. I wanted to test out a webcam on rPi, there’s as massive difference between just being able to install VLC from repositories as you can on x86, and what you have to do on rPi, to compile a special version to work with the rPi’s proprietary graphics/video stack.