> the rpi4 is hardly the best in many ways, but it is the one board that likely isn't going to be abandoned in a couple years.
That might have been true once upon a time, but not any more. Once a board is supported by the open source community, it is no longer dependent on vendor updates. I think Armbian has a good track record of long term support, and mainline Debian has a fantastic record of it. The RockPro64 (which I mentioned above) doesn't even require any vendor blobs.
> the ODROID-H2+ kicks the pants off all these devices
That device uses an Intel Celeron processor, and probably more power, and costs nearly twice as much. I don't consider it comparable to a low-power ARM board outside of a superficial sense. (Nice to know it exists, though; it seems like an interesting middle ground.)
The rk3399 devices are definitely on the better side of open source support. A large part of that has been rockchip's been more open than other vendors recently, but its still AFAIK not as clean as you suggest.
As far as whether the celeron is better or worse power wise, I couldn't answer. But for sure I wouldn't make such sweeping statements. A lot of people think ARM=low power, but the power mgmt on these more "open" boards is actually quite bad. A large part of that is simply the fact that mainline linux is missing much of the finer points of controlling these boards. So, maybe the board could be X watt's with a given workload, but due to the lack of frequency control on the memory controller (or whatever) it ends up being 5-10X. The intel boards tend to be much more dynamic at this point.
For example, comparing an rpi4 and an atomic pi, you wouldn't expect from the massive heatsink on the atomicpi that it ends up being much lower power than the rpi4 for quite a number of workloads.
That might have been true once upon a time, but not any more. Once a board is supported by the open source community, it is no longer dependent on vendor updates. I think Armbian has a good track record of long term support, and mainline Debian has a fantastic record of it. The RockPro64 (which I mentioned above) doesn't even require any vendor blobs.
> the ODROID-H2+ kicks the pants off all these devices
That device uses an Intel Celeron processor, and probably more power, and costs nearly twice as much. I don't consider it comparable to a low-power ARM board outside of a superficial sense. (Nice to know it exists, though; it seems like an interesting middle ground.)