After the initial setup and installation, I have put some more time into testing of the software, covering the following topics:
Linux Desktop
I finally found the setting in my archaic HDMI monitor to turn off the 'overscan' feature, so I now have a workable area on my screen. The system boots in the wayland/weston desktop, which looks very nice, and seems to be working smoothly. The commands in the menu are for setting Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and some basic things like gedit and a terminal. The latter starts up without a bash shell, which seems strange to me.
I have installed libreoffice to get some feeling about the desktop's usability, but I soon found out that it doesn't work, as Wayland is completely different from the X server environment that most graphical programs on Linux expect. With the additional installation of Xwayland I got it to work, but it lacks the desktop UI to get a complete workable desktop. Anyway, it is clear to me to get this working, you need to tweak quite a lot, and maybe build a different distro (like raspbian for the raspberry pi) to get a coherent set of packages. This was not my main objective, so I left it at that: I am able to run graphical programs if needed, and that is all I need at the moment.
A first Experiment: Home Assistant
My main domotica application at the moment is 'Home Assistant' (https://www.home-assistant.io/ ), a python-based framework that provides a GUI to control different kinds of domotica devices. As an experiment on the usefullness of the maaxboard as a domotica server (instead of a raspberry pi or i5/i7-based NUC, as advised on the Home Assistant homepage) I followed the instructions to build a system from scratch. This worked almost flawlessly, the only difference being that there wasn't a group 'gpio' on the maaxboard, since that is part of the WiringPi library. The installation of all the python packages worked fine, and after some time (considerably less time than on my raspberry pi 3, probably helped by the copious 2GB of RAM) I was rewarded with a working Home Assistant installation:
So this maaxboard is definitely usable as a domotica server.