[thebrid]

I was searching for a good ARM board for tinkering a while back and settled on the Odroid N2+. That has a pretty good trade-off between performance and price. It retails for less than $100 and has 6 cores total, 4 performance A73 cores clocked at 2.4 GHz (compared with the 2 GHz A72s here) and 2 efficiency A53 cores at 2 GHz. This has at least good Linux support with armbian[1] and ArchLinux ARM[2].

Outside of Apple, there are not many modern options. The A73s above are 4 generations old now. There are some ARM laptops with the faster Snapdragon 8CX chip but these still don't come close to the M1.

[1] https://www.armbian.com/odroid-n2/

[2] https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/amlogic/odroid-n2

[CameronNemo]

Amlogic boards have great mainline Linux support, but their firmware/uboot setup is full of blobs, can only use an old compiler toolchain, and only works with an old version of uboot. I am linking to the odriod n2 instructions below, but if you look at any of the Amlogic boards it is a similar situation. (Including the beloved Khadas VIM3).

https://u-boot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/board/amlogic/odroid...