Your best option is to look into Armbian (https://armbian.com/) for these, they do the Lord's work when it comes to making sure these alternatives aren't destined to be ewaste when vendors abandon them. I'd say Radxa are probably in 2nd place after Raspberry Pi when it comes to support, but Armbian still makes that a lot better.

They are two different things. You're not running a full blown Linux OS on the ESP32. But many of the simple projects people used the Pi for can be done with the ESP32.