[evgen]

For a lot of them it seems that the more they vary from a Pi the harder it becomes to maintain a decent OS foundation. The Orange Pis and Pine64 boards are fairly well supported by Armbian (provided you are willing to live on the bleeding edge if you are running more recent chips like the Allwinner H5) but as you go further afield you have to be very comfortable doing OS builds yourself and a lot of the board features that look cool are only supported by an ancient and buggy vendor OS release.

Always check forums for the boards and your target OS to see what OS you can expect to run with any stability and do not assume it will ever get any better or be updated beyond where it is right now...