I feel more comfortable that the x86 devices will be better supported by community distros than non raspberri pi arm boards from this past experience. The 8gb Pis are enough to play around with home-lab getting more familiar with Kubernetes and setup/configure for distributed software, but wouldn't mind a bit more compute power to go with it.
Also, I kind of wish more of these were direct sale rather than kickstarter/crowdsupply backed, etc. I have already lost enough money on various projects that I've stopped backing things. I know it's always a risk, but at this point it's been much less worth it for me.
edit: One addition, cases for those of us without 3D printer access or experience is another common issue.
https://www.armbian.com/download/ lists the various boards they support.
E.g. the 4Gb Jeston Nano has a lot of compute power compared to a 1Gb RPi, but the price of $99 vs ~$30 means it's not really an "alternative" as much as it's a product intended for a different purpose.
You can even get full blown x64 PCs in roughly the same size. They'll blow away any of the RPi line, but at a price.
The Raspberry Pi's have undoubtedly the widest community support, so can be great if you're a beginner. However, for a lot of projects, I've been frustrated by it. Things that should "just work" like i2c don't always, and it's limited for some tasks like hardware PWM (only two PWM outs vs. six for the Odroid). On the other hand, the Jetson Nano's ability to run CUDA is killer, especially for certain computer vision tasks, but it doesn't always seem to have great docs and the forum isn't always particularly helpful. The Beaglebones are fine, but tbh seem to be showing their age. The strength of availabile ARM SBCs has drastically scaled up even in the past few years, and I don't think they've kept up.
The Odroid-C4 board is a great middle ground. It took a little while to figure out, but if you're comfortable reading docs and asking questions on community forums (I needed to add certain GPIO groups to a config file and reboot to see them in the device tree, but you don't need to be able to compile your own kernel or anything) and not on a deadline, the performance is both better than the Pi4 on paper and seems noticably smoother for certain tasks than any of the other boards, especially basic desktop use. Also, no onboard WiFi, but USB chips have been plug-and-play so far. The N2+ has even more cores and a built-in real-time clock + coin battery holder (maybe useful for hibernation modes?), so I'm looking forward to playing around with that soon.
The Raspberry Pi is more than it's hardware. Software support and Community support make it what it is.
Odroids are great devices but the community depends on a few stars who do it for love. Raspberry Pi has made progress and I must say that I like the R.Pi 400 (i.e. keyboard Pi) very much.
I run Armbian on all three which was easy to set up with the eMMC storage and use two for unbound and the third for a Unifi Controller.
I had looked at the current RPis and they weren't attractive. I'll check them out again once CM4 + I/O board comes out or wait for the TuringPi 2.
