I've been keeping the Rasberry Pi in the corner of my eye basically since it came out. I'm most familiar with Windows operating environments, so the specs always seemed lacking for mainstream usage. However, I just discovered the Orange Pi Plus which seems to be getting into specs that rival any modern smartphone at least. I'd be looking at installing Linux on one of these, and probably at first doing something like a HTPC with it. Just mess around with stuff, explore new things.
Since I'm new to this whole concept, I'd like something that's got most of the parts there already (the first Raspberry Pi was frighteningly barren), so having a wireless card (unsure about it's effectiveness, maybe not worth the added cost?) and some [common] inputs and outputs is comforting. What I'm not sure about is RAM. I don't have a ton of Linux experience, so how much RAM is recommended? At least the 1GB I'm assuming? There's also a model with 2GB for $10 more.
Is $40 even a good price for something like this?
Are these dev boards up to a point where they're worth using?
What do you do with yours?