Exactly, I tried using Omega Onion’s but it turns out you can really only use their version of Linux. They claim support for booting from an SD card, but not really. The Chinese based Orange/Nano’s use Allwinner soc’s and the mainstream Linux support for those have gotten better, but nowhere near the pi’s.

Though must say TI AM3* boards (beagle’s) have good mainline Linux support and they appear to do all their work on public got repos. Now the iMX* boards seem nice but I haven’t really found a maker board variant.