I very much like the aesthetics and overall design of the roon nucleus, but I wanted to ask, is it possible to install a generic Linux version on it rather than the custom roon OS it uses?
The reason being that I’m looking for a machine to act as both my core, and a hqplayer processor. Which the nucleus by default cannot.
I’d rather not have to build a mini pc to achieve this, can you install Linux on the nucleus?
Could you. Probably. It is a standard Intel NUC motherboard. Should you. Probably not.
Roon OS with Nucleus enhancements was built and fine tuned to manage temperatures in that fanless case. A generic Linux build probably not as well, if at all; especially factoring in hqplayer. And a such, probably voiding any warranty and re-sale value.
You can build a similar computer, fanless case and all, for less money, and with more control over internal parts.
But, frankly, I think you are doing this backwards. You don’t need a machine spec’d for Roon, you need a machine spec’d for HQPlayer. It all depending on what kind of upsampling you want to do and what filters you want to use. It is very easy to set filters that will crush those little mobile CPUs.
For example, to achieve the EC filters (like ASDM7EC) with any kind of high rate DSD, you should be looking for a desktop CPU (I use an i7-9770k) and machine large enough so you can add in an NVIDIA based Graphics Card to use CUDA offloading (GTX 2080ti works great), which is needed even with those beefy CPUs.
Very expensive option for something that would invalidate your warranty instantly. There are other fanless prebuilts likely better specced to do what you want and cheaper out there.
Horsepower, looks, great support.
Or custom one of these