Serious question you can now (apart from dedicated GPIO) buy PC's for similar or less $ than PI4 (with a few options and storage/case etc) so does the higher end PI SBC et al still have a place?
I don't use Pi's, and consider higher-end to be boards like
Odroid M1,
Odroid N2+, Radxa
Rock 5b, and such.
To me, there are two key points:
- Vanilla kernel support. I don't want to be stuck with vendor kernels, I want to be able to use my board even after the vendor switches to newer models, so I want all support to be pushed/pushable to vanilla upstream kernels. Vendor kernels are useful, if and only if the source is close enough to vanilla to be ported upstream. Custom flattened/modified kernel trees are useless to me.
- Connectivity. Not just GPIO, but also stuff like CSI for direct camera connections.
None of my SBCs are used as a laptop/desktop replacements. I see the PC's you referred to as mini-desktops used for web browsing, social media, maybe to run dedicated applications and appliances, with the PC mounted to the back of the display as usual; and not as replacing any of my own SBC use cases. Perhaps NAS boxes and IOT gateway/firewall servers, if the power consumption is low enough?
Using microcontrollers (especially via high-speed USB like Teensy 4.0) to interface to outside does blur the lines a bit, but CSI and similar high-speed parallel buses are still relatively rare in cheap microcontrollers, and tend to only be available on SBCs.
I should also mention the GUI for this is available on Windoze, Mac and several versions of Linux so it's not an OS thing, likely regardless of the hardware I choose in the end I think I will give Linux a go (now as a heretic and critic of the Distro mess I expect to burst into spontaneous flames )
I like that GUI approach myself.
As to heretic, BAH! There is nothing worse than axiomatic/dogmatic opinions. You have constructed your opinion based on observable details, so hereticism definitely does not apply, whether or not one agrees with your conclusions or the importance of those details. As to being critical about Linux, so am I; it is only a tool, after all.
What annoys me, is how people take Windows and x86-based systems as the prototype and pinnacle of computers, and assume stuff they observe under Windows is directly applicable to all other systems. The recent discussion on using USB3-connected ADC and process it on the host computer is a particularly annoying example. Just because you need a high-end Intel Core i7/i9 processor to do something in Windows, does not mean a cheap SBC cannot do the same processing task at a fraction of the cost and power consumption; it only depends on the exact details of the processing task, and whether the SBC has buses and facilities suitable for such processing.
Such misconceptions lead to using the wrong tool for the job, wasting resources for no sensible reason.