I’m a huge fan of octoprint on raspberry pi. I’m not a huge fan of raspberry pi lately. I’ve heard of le potato and orange pi. Some searching shows that people have done it on both of those.
Does anyone have any experience running it on a small board computer other than raspi?
But for 15$ more, you get an immensely more useful tool for when you (probably) inevitably want to do more/other things. SD cards for a few bucks burn out really quickly, so you’d really want a good one (significantly more expensive) or an SSD, bringing the total cost of a pi above a used NUC, with worse specs all around.
I really can’t see the argument, neither financial, performance/watt or performance/$ for an SBC if you don’t need GPIOs.
That’s the key here, not everyone wants to do that. OP specifically asked for something to run octoprint, not an entire homelab. Not everyone is interested in that.