I do ARM development for the Fedora project (fedoraproject.org), and we used to be the so-called main distro for the RPI. We lost that to raspian, and the reason is nobody in the project actually wanted to use the RPI. It really is a very poor ARM device compared to all the others, and the central point is that it's using ARMv6. The cost is very high as all the thousands of packages would have to be recompiled to support the RPI, and sadly the RPI is the only ARMv6 board, most of the other ARMv6 were cell phones. That means it's more productive to target ARMv7 or ARMv5 as there were many many boards with those parts. Fortunatly the RPI will work with the ARMv5 software, and we have measured very minimal improvements by going with ARMv6 packages. Any anyhoo, nobody I know actually wants to use the RPI for anything. It's a bad boards. Right now the latest ARM hotness is the arndale boards, and the 2012 samsung chromebook that features an ARMv7 a15 exynos SoC. That bad boy supports hardware virtualization
That's also my experience.
The price tag makes it neat to tinker with for a day or two but very few people seem find a real-world application for it. I tried to use mine as a cheap Zoneminder surveillance solution, but the rPI barely managed a single camera at 640x480 with 2 (two) fps and motion detection. It was overclocked to "Turbo" too.
right now the fashionable ARM boards are: * panda board (omap4) [1]
* beagle board (omap3) [2]
* trimslice (tegra2) [3]
* arndale & chromebook (exynos5) [4]
* cubieboard (allwinner a10) [5] I've got all of these boards, and I like the pandaboard the most, then the trimslice.
For opensource events the one I use to demo fedora is usually the pandaboard.
That is because Texas Instruments did the best job at upstreaming the kernel code, so it works the best. The cubiboard is nice, it is the same SoC in the mk802 [6]... which is close to the price point of the Raspberry PI except is WAY much more powerful. I guess the question to you is what do you want to do? Do you plan to use any kind of GPIO pins, to say... use LEDs or interface to something else? Or would you be happy with just video output? [1] http://www.omappedia.com/wiki/PandaBoard
[2] http://beagleboard.org/
[3] http://trimslice.com/
[4] http://www.arndaleboard.org/
[5] http://cubieboard.org/
[6] http://www.rikomagic.co.uk/
Let's be honest... at this point, I want an HTPC that doesn't suck. Tweaking with other stuff would be awesome, but I just don't have time to play hacker. The pi was appealing because it was just enough hackery to make me feel 1337 without any of the actual effort involved in doing something real. There's probably a Roku that will do what I need for cheaper than the Pandaboard. I'm sure I can come up with reasons to do something more bitchin' than that, but I'd have to reach. Does that make sense?
No idea what htpc means or what a roku are. Regardless.... many boards I'm sure could fit your needs. Id suggest the mk802 since you probably wont be needing gpio pins.. the arm soc for those will be in mainline linux in the next few months... supported now in somebodys github