It’s better and worse with Win10. The updates tend to be more reliable but they are also more insistent about them. I think the issue above is more one of care and feeding rather than availability of your services.
You don’t want to run an unpatched windows box that the world can see. If it’s well hidden behind a firewall/nat router you are ok if you aren’t going out and using the internet on it. But in general there ARE patches to apply and reboots to be done after the patches.
With the ROCK it does it’s own updates etc. you don’t control or have to think about it.
It really comes down to your view of wether the ROCK is an appliance or a more general purpose computer. I like that it’s an appliance, but I am also frustrated by it occasionally because my nice shiny new NUC is always idle. And I can’t go in and fiddle with things like the host name.
Thanks all. That’s a very balanced view. I now have a good feel for which direction to take. Yes, a NUC would be ideal, but a used Win PC can be had for less than half a NUC price
If you go the Windows 10 PC route, and it is only for the Roon Core, then you can install Roon Server (not the full Roon package) on it, and run it headless. See this KB article as well.
You can run RoonServer on a PC instead of Roon Core. RoonServer does not have a GUI frontend (which means it’s more like ROCK). But you can fully control it from any other PC or tablet running the Roon app on your network. You can also do so with your smartphone, but that’s a bit trickier because the Roon phone app is a bit less functional (or at least, it is on an iPhone).
FWIW, I’m running RoonServer on a tiny PC (Lenovo m90n) running Win 10 Pro. It’s a headless PC that I keep stored next to the router. Roon is about the only thing I’m running on it although i do have backup software running as well. I control Roon from my iPad or another computer. When I need to manage anything on that computer, I just use a remote desktop connection to do so. Works like a charm.
That, and vendor support if you need it. They are not too important to me so I tried with some old hardware already on hand and I’m quite happy so far.
I installed ROCK it on a legacy boot capable x86 dual core (32G SSD, 4GB RAM, wired Ethernet cable to router), copied the commands in to get it running, plugged in the library on USB and installed Roon app on android. It just works.
During the trial I tried Roon server on Ubuntu Studio and ran core on Windows 10 and they worked fine. Rock /Mock is better though and it’s nice to dedicate an older machine to music.