alt Hacker News> while the Raspberry Pi was about the same price as an Arduino but way better performance
If you are cross shopping a full single board computer (Pi) with a microcontroller (arduino/esp32 etc) for a project, it's almost always a sign you don't know what you are doing. With the exception of the recent Pi Pico, non of the raspberry pis are Arduino/microcontroller competitors - they are typically full blown linux computers with all the benefits and drawbacks that provides.
While you can absolutely solve microcontroller-style problems with full blown computers, it's rarely the best/cheapest option.
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Counterpoint: prototyping and low volume production runs. Hardware is cheap - development time is expensive.
FWIIW - The new Uno Q is exactly the midpoint of your comment - a linux based computer WITH a STM32 coprocessor to confuse the heck out of everything.
Right but if you're a hobbyist, "cheap" isn't the priority. I mean, what's the harm of using a $40 SBC instead of a $10 one if you're going to be spending hundreds of dollars and dozens of man-hours on it?
The bigger concern is the overhead of the Linux OS in terms of interacting with it vs just flashing a microcontroller... but linux lets you run an SSH and FTP servers and wifi and a debugger on the thing easily.
So you get easier access to remotely playing with the programming of your gizmo, but you have the OS in the way of just talking to hardware in real-time. I haven't done projects like that since my undergrad, does it really make that much difference?
To me the big deal-breaker would probably be if the thing I was building was battery-powered.
True from an industry perspective, but they're very much competitors in the hobby market.