Sorry, the title sounds like flamebait but it's not meant to be. I'm just looking for options.
I wanted to ask about my possible hardware options for a Debian-friendly desktop replacement PC. The overwhelming majority of contenders are based on some kind of Intel processor, but I'm curious whether I should also be thinking about alternatives like AMD or Arm.
This isn't going to be a high-power gaming rig, the main priorities are small size (preferably more like a shoebox than a travel-suitcase), low noise, high reliability and high efficiency (drawing relatively little electricity without being painfully slow). And linux-friendly, with regular updates. I'm thinking new rather than second-hand, and probably some kind of assemble-it-yourself thing rather than a standard off-the-shelf box.
On the Intel side, there's a wide range of options at various power levels, seemingly high linux compatibility and seemingly very competitive performance-per-watt, enabling small quiet boxes. But Intel haven't exactly been doing a good customer relations job lately.
AMD appear to have more "integrated graphics" options than before and have improved their efficiency, but still seem behind in terms of stability under linux, according to recent reviews I've read in magazines. And the choice of compatible mainboards and barebone systems seems very much more limited.
Which leaves (I think) just Arm and the very low-cost, low-power boards. My Pi v1 is extremely cheap, extremely low power, receives regular Raspbian updates and is in many other ways brilliant, but it's not a desktop replacement. I'd have thought that in the years since, other boards would have moved in to fill the gap, with many more and faster cores, more than 1GB RAM, faster SSD options and so on. But the other boards I've seen like the Odroid and the BananaPi seem to lack the excellent linux support which the Pi has, I'm not sure why. I always figured that linux on Arm would be extremely well supported but it seems they're still struggling with OldStable on some of the arm architectures. And I'd rather not spend time compiling kernels and tinkering with isos, I'd ideally have a 'standard' image to use.
So can anyone recommend another direction I should look in, or are those three my best options? And of those, would you agree that for what I want Intel is probably still probably the most suitable for what I want, despite any misgivings?