They were never about hobbies. We were a niche that they were happy to have, but they never cared. Origionally it was about education (which has a large overlap with hobbies so they served well).

OrangePI

Arduinos all the way down I guess

Lattepanda mu is apparently a very powerful alternative.

Radxa for RISC-V SBCs with GPIO.

I have been using Odroid boards for many years. I currently have 3 C4 boards and 1 older C1 board. My kids use them as their computer in their rooms. Hardkernel is the company behind the boards, they also provided the official Home assistant blue devices that came pre installed with HASS.

The only downside I see with LePotato is that it has no SteamLink client (for now). Otherwise, there are plenty of OSes made for it. I have one SD card for CoreELEC to watch things on the TV, and one with Batocera for game emulators.

Orange or banana pi

I had so many ideas for things we could use these for that completely revolutionize what is now a terrible user experience. No idea how to implement on these ideas, but it’s a start I guess.

Any N300 based PC is under $200, tiny, low watts, faster than a Pi5, and can run any distro because it’s a regular PC.

I’m using a lepotato for Home Assistant. Works very well for months now, but I’m a bit worried about long term distro support

The pandemic shortage marked the end of the RPi as a hobbyist board. All the stock when to companies, and every hobbyist shop jacked the prices, and scalpers even more.

Do arduino stuff or look up chips with those cortexm0 arm processors. Like these: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3403