What I'm saying is treat the board as a development harness to get your project going. If you have issues with the processor don't take it up with the board maker because they're usually just as clueless. The exception would be boards like RPi or Beagle where the designers are tight with or owned by the chipmakers themselves.

Right, which is what GP was saying: stick to those that are able to support longer than zero time horizon.

But the fundamental difference here is that most people buying SBCs are treating them as self-contained COTS compute modules.

As someone that has worked with these EVKs for decades, you never treated them as part of your final product. But with the advent of Beagle and RPI, that's where we are now.

But when you buy an RPi or Beaglebone as the core of your industrial smelter and expect support for that module comparable to, say, a module from Kontron? You're going to be disappointed.

Support is the S in IOT.

I thought that.... oh, Security is the other S. Got it!

Identity is the Id in IdIoT.

Board support packages very rarely get updated and usually target a very specific kernel version.

You move off that kernel version, no BSP, no boot. sad times.

This is one reason why you don't get android phones supported past the android release shipped.

You're completely at the mercy of the SoC provider. Promises of 'n' years support are quite often quietly dropped after 18 months, when they realise all the engineers have moved to working madly to get the latest SoC's BSP out of the door.

Rinse and repeat.

Haiku is already working on the board, although you need to build your own, as there's no public builds for it.

Haiku remarkably does have proper driver APIs and stable ABIs.

Linux is and will remain painful, on all platforms, until it is finally deprecated, and for a while longer after that.