Hey Jayson,
I do most of the production operating system design implementations to-date for Spooky, American Pinball, Multimorphic and Valley-Dynamo. All of these companies have varying production needs for their systems, but in the end, the core is mostly the same.
As others here have stated, it really depends on your game needs. Every game designer I've worked with has had to make tweaks to optimize their code for production, which often means choosing which assets to stream from disk (like video) versus which to preload into memory. Often times we're working with anywhere from 512mb to 2gb of ram (up to 8 in certain manufacturers cases), so they have to ration it. If you're going to use an SSD, you can stream things from disk all day long and the game will likely keep up. If you're using an SD card, that might be a tad difficult, so you'll want to preload more. If you're using eMMC, there will typically be a balance between the two, but the I/O is a bit faster. We use several tricks to get around this.
Most of those developers, like yourself, first used Lubuntu because it was quick to develop on. I agree with this choice. Get off the ground quickly!
Using something like a UDOO is actually not a bad idea as its a single board computer and you can compile a custom linux kernel for it. If you're wondering how we achieve 3-5 or even 10 second boot times, its generally because its running a custom linux distribution targeting the hardware its running on, and as such, it ONLY loads what it needs. For example, on a RPi3, on raspbian you're looking at 40-60 seconds even before the game starts to load. On Pinix (our custom operating system setup), its about 3 seconds from the time you power on to the time the OS starts loading the game.
So, in summary, a few things to note:
1. Using single board computers is a great idea if you can get the horsepower out of them. They're easy to compile custom linux kernels for
2. eMMC is great if you can get it
3. Using a custom distribution of linux also makes it easy to lock your file systems down to read-only mode to prevent drive corruption on power off
4. Choose a SBC with good SDL2/OpenGL/OpenGLES support as thats typically the most painful part for machines that need video functionality
-- Jimmy
