I have never gotten used to using venvs and lately they all seem to be outlawing this easy-but-not-advisable practice, it’s quite annoying.
It’s a bit of a faff, but as with most thigs that are considered best practice, it pays off in the long run. Especially if you’re like me and use a few different distros, python package naming isn’t consistant.
I don’t see supporting additional architectures as “leaving the Pi OS” - I seriously doubt that Zynthian would drop support for RPi in the foreseeable future.
But, I think Zynthian could be much more portable - to other architectures such as RISC-V, Intel, etc., as well as to other Arm chips-SBCs.
The motivations for a RISC-V port include:
The belief that openness of the architecture will allow experimentation with new ideas, such as FPGA assist, more easily.
The hope that faster and more core implementations of RISC-V at lower cost than Arm will someday be available.
And “belief” and “hope” are indeed speculative. Before the RPi5 we thought Arm and RISC-V were roughly equivalent in terms of available SBCs. Now RISC-V has got some catching up to do!
I agree with you re x86, although it wouldn’t be a bad thing, just not as interesting now, to me.