Good project board with a lot of projects and a large community

The thing is suitable for a lot of projects and has a very large community. Even if there are clones with ARM7, the then Ubuntu support and is faster, you should consider how it looks with the community in these new, unknown, devices and perhaps instead but the Rasp. pick.

Who wonders whether he should get a Arduino or Rasp: Arduino has the advantage that it consumes far fewer watts (but less processing power than Rasp) and only then I would use it; Disadvantages compared with the Rasp is in my opinion a lot more than advantages (no LAN connection, no desktop operating, much less computing power, ...) (for purposes other thought but I write here because it is not always clear what you need).

The Raspberry is still far too weak to this as a very reasonable desktop PC to use for example for parents.

Warning, there is an updated version of B + this board from the same manufacturer at the same price. 1GB RAM and an ARMv7 would have been good anyway, because even as intended by the manufacturer of the desktop is ready for operation very slow and laggy. The A model can then be used for things such as moving cars, the (ARMv7) B model for smoother desktop or even as a parent-PC (I know that's not the purpose of the Rasp).