Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?

I think the appeal of the RPi has to do with the amount of online tutorials that beginners can understand, and the experience of assembling something from pieces.

I agree with the experience of assembling something from pieces is valuable.

But if you don't want that, there's no need for "online tutorials for beginners" and that shouldn't be counted as an additional appeal. It's just Windows.

Also, rasbian is super solid to those tutorials I have found - they don't seem to pull repositories every version so you can still install things easily.

There are even more tutorial for mini-pc since they are using a x64 architecture.

At least half of the "how to do X on a raspberry pi" beginner tutorials don't actually use any RPi specific features like GPIO and apply equally well to Linux desktops.

Not for a lot of use cases, like how to get 4G/5G cellular connectivity, how to monitor something using an embedded/tiny camera and a small machine learning model, or how to build a little HMI device using a 4" touchscreen...

For basic homelab use cases, almost any computer is fine, but for IoT-style stuff especially, a Pi-focused will have a lot more hits, and the tutorials won't apply to any of the mini PCs.

The problem with a lot of pi stuff is that a lot of it is just so out of date, especially as the community just didn't fully transition to the RPI5

So for running things on an N100 it works in the same way as any other PC

> the experience of assembling something from pieces.

What pieces? RPis are single board computers, no assembly required.

If Intel NUCs were sold without a case/shell, they'd probably be able to appeal more to the same hobby market RPi dominates (although the RPi does still look more aesthetically pleasing)