I'm using the StarFive VisionFive 2 and its working quite well, there are debain and ubuntu images available as well as some other distributions, generally most of the boards features are working fine and there is a community around it actively improving software support.
For your requirements it might be a bit overkill in performance as its more in the neighborhood of a RasperryPi 3/4 in terms of size, power consumption and performance.
Scala quicky got my favourite language. I really like handling data using functional and imutable concepts.
Great libraries for db access (slick) and json handling (sparay-json) were not mentioned in the article, I wonder why slick is not even mentioned in the comments, it is really nice!
Using scala with these and combined with akka and futures feels like a so natural way of programming for me.
I generally love Telegram, but what bothers me is that they don't end-to-end encrypt my messages. Sure they do in the "private"-mode but this is not really usable to me, as there is no desktop client and my messages are often not arriving as reliable as the normal ones...
I'm disappointed in Munichs' decision-makers in this case. Introducing linux was a great step towards a more open, secure and cost-effective platform to organize the city. The reasoning behind switching back to Microsoft is vague to me, the main factors seem general it-problems not related to linux, users wanting to open their .exe and windows programms (wouldn't be allowed with a Microsoft system as well due to security issues) and the fact Microsoft built a new shiny office.
I started a personal project for logging my life, first steps were location tracking but features like connecting my lastfm account, pictures taken and inserting notes will come.
The idea is having a mobile application for tracking to a self-hosted api and a web-client for having a feed (like facebook about myself).
This will be released open source once it's somewhat presentable.
I'd say he should try, but with out to high expectations or financial investments.
Linux offers could work for people just wanting a working computer with less risk of viruses. People that don't care for their machine running Linux.
Most other people interested are tech savvy and will compare other offerings as well or selfbuild.
For your requirements it might be a bit overkill in performance as its more in the neighborhood of a RasperryPi 3/4 in terms of size, power consumption and performance.