Raspberry Pi is actively preventing enthusiasts from upgrading soldered memory to a larger configuration even when the replacement chip is technically compatible. The company says the restriction is intended to discourage unofficial high-capacity resales.
Orange Pi, Banana Pi, plenty of other Chinese SBC makers who products don’t necessarilly have names ending in Pi. Tons of those in places like Aliexpress. You can even try a Risk-V architecture if you’re daring.
The problem is that their english language support is inferior, as is the software stack, plus the ecosystem is a lot smaller so there’s a lot less info on those from other people out there. That said, as far as I can tell all of them have at least one Linux distro (at the very least ARMbian), some having more distros.
Still, it would be fine if all you want is a small computer with HDMI to turn it into a media player using Linux and something like Kodi.
Alternativelly, just get a Mini-PC with a low power intel chip like the N100 - which is actually cheaper than a Raspberri Pi 5 whilst being more powerful and with better peripheral compatibility since it has a PC architecture - and put the Linux with Kodi in it. Sure, it uses more power because it’s not ARM, but not actually that much more (15w vs 8w for a Pi, if I remember it correctly).
Raspberri Pi devices are maybe twice the price of other devices with equivalent hardware, which means that the low-end low-power Mini-PCs are cheaper and yet more powerful and compatible than the high end Pi.
I have a mini PC just like that at home working as a TV Media Player (which a nice remote control and everything) and I even use it as a home server and home nas (remotelly controlled via web interfaces and SSH) since it’s has far more power than needed for just being a media player.
Also, limited support, both in community size and time. Those Chinese manufacturing companies come and go like docker containers. They spin one up to sell some product for a while, then when they’re done they dissolve it. If you want any support, you’re on your own.
It’s hard to imagine exactly what kind of person would want to build their own Linux media server but also actually needs to contact tech support for hardware they own outright.
Half the fun anyway is getting it to work at all, the other half is tweaking and getting it to work exactly the way you want.
I’m a $50-$100 “mystery Thinkpad from eBay” kind of guy. From what I gather, there are lots of us. Exactly zero times have I thought “oh but what if I need to contact Lenovo?” LMAO
I mean community support, as in the number of people using them and have experience, who know what works and what doesn’t.
Tech support in the sense of stuff like bios updates is important too.
This. I switched from planning on a raspberry pi, to just getting a mini PC. It works as my main desktop now.