They are great for controllers and embedded projects that end users don’t interact with directly, but they are terrible for end-user personal computing.
If you buy x86 (fanless) mini PCs, ACPI and UEFI allow you to install any generic OS image.
If you buy ARM/RISC-V (single board) computers, you will not get UEFI and ACPI automatically. Thus, you have to jump through hoops and loops for “months” to install any unsupported OS on them. I don’t have “months” to waste. I just want to install an OS and work.
Even if you just use the provided OS images, OS updates from hardware vendors may stop, and software support for GPU and other hardware isn’t great in the provided OS images. ARM/RISC-V hardware manufacturers don’t care much about supporting their hardware with software.
There are many x86 fanless mini PCs that are efficient with power. I don’t need single board computers for headless home servers.
If you want to install guix system on ARM or RISC-V, you will end up wasting weeks and months without a guarantee that it will be installed at all. Gentoo linux and arch linux may be installable, but they require special tinkering.
I don’t want pointless tinkering. I just want good things now quickly. Give me the good things quickly. Quick. Quick. Speed.
My advice: Don’t even look at ARM and RISC-V (single board) computers until there are products that support generic OS images without any special tinkering. For the foreseeable future, if you want to get things done quickly, stick to x86.
My own experience is quite different. Using a raspberry pi or similar widely known board with a supported OS like Raspian, Debian or even NixOS works just fine, at least for a headless home server. The perceived tinkering mostly comes from its unique use case. Headless systems are naturally more trouble to “get right” esp. when it comes to updates (and post-update reboots). But that has nothing to do with OS support.
Its is true, though, that GPU support is lacking and that disk and RAM I/O performance is underwhelming compared to x86.
Fanless x86 mini PCs are far easier to set up than ARM and RISC-V and any other CPU architecture.
If you don’t use supported OS images, in most cases, you have to cross-compile “downstream” linux kernel along with its device tree file and also fiddle with “downstream” bootloader. Some libre computer single board computers support UEFI and have device tree files in “upstream” linux kernel, but these are rare exceptions.
The need to compile device tree file bothers me a bit because linux kernel has to carry these device tree files with it. Why can’t they just embed device tree file in the board or support ACPI? If they embed device tree in the board, linux kernel doesn’t have to carry device tree file for each board.
For my personal computers, I don’t want to use any OS supported by board manufacturers. I want to manually install my own linux distributions. Having to bother with “downstream” linux and “downstream” bootloader and device tree file is a deal breaker.
At this point, I wouldn’t bother with anything but x86 for my personal computers because x86 computers come with ACPI(a substitute for device tree in linux kernel) and UEFI(an installation-free alternative to uboot).