I'm not a fan of the rasperry pi and the fundation behind it for reasons I don't want to go into here and would rather not support them with money. Honestly, hearing that the N2 will have no trouble with fbdev/turbo in 1280x1024 was pretty much all I wanted to hear. I could probably use kodi for multimedia, that'd leave checking out how well libsdl/sdl2 is supported with mali and framebuffer. Many thanks!
I'm running an Odroid N2 as a desktop at 2460x1440@60hz typically with 3 terminals, and chromium with hangouts, homeassistant, plex, slack, and armbian forums always pinned.
i'd tried ARM desktop in the past with my le potato and tritium h5... wasn't quite there...... I used an Atomic Pi and it was sufficient--but ultimately 2 gigs of ram wasn't enough even with zram compression. Finally I tried the N2, and I think it's there.. even with bruteforce fbturbo doing the video.. I'm running Armbian bionic, with vendor kernel and Mate Desktop... pretty happy with it.