alt Hacker NewsRisc PCs were obscure machines, even then and compared to the original Archimedes (which itself was an oddity), so lacking support isn't surprising. A 710 model not upgraded to a StrongArm would have come from well outside the enthusiast sphere which is where all the dev work was happening. (So probably a school model from a time when schools were heavily moving to PCs).
Back in 1995/6 or so it seemed like half the Acorn employees at Acorn World had their Risc PCs running NetBSD. By 1995 if you were doing software dev on Risc OS your environment and tools were absolutely terrible compared to what existed on Mac/PC/Unix, which was a factor that contributed to people interested in programming abandoning Acorn hardware entirely.
Back in the day I worked for the makers of Yellow Dog Linux, and I think because of these scarcities we had a pretty good model of buying Apple Risc hardware at OEM prices and putting Linux on them, mostly for university scientists but also for enthusiasts. There was a lot of work keeping Linux running on hardware created by a company that was ambivalent about having alternative operating systems on its hardware, but it was fun and a great group of people to work for.