Hey, Al! Welcome to Roon!
I ran a TX-8050, an older version of your receiver, for a while. Some thoughts:
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Don’t worry about WiFi versus Ethernet. If you’ve got a good WiFi network, there will be no difference in sound between the two. If you get drop-outs and/or clicks and pops with WiFi, you might need a better connection.
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DLNA versus Roon. DLNA is a more restrictive version of UPnP, and you can read Roon’s hatred of UPnP here. When DLNA is working well, it will deliver the same bits digitally to the Onkyo, so I wouldn’t expect them to sound different.
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Airplay versus Chromecast. Roon really likes the Chromecast protocol, it seems almost as much as they like their own proprietary RAAT protocol, so I’d expect things to work well over that. I imagine Apple and Airplay gives them less flexibility.
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NAS files versus local files. Roon hates it when the machine running Roon Core (your old laptop) has to pull files from a NAS. I wound up putting my Roon Core on my Synology NAS temporarily, and then it worked so well, I just left it there.
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Roon Ready. This basically allows Roon to control the functions of the receiver. So you can use the Roon remote to turn it off and on, adjust the volume, etc. in addition to selecting which songs to play. It also allows Roon to use their RAAT protocol, which is supposed to be the best thing ever in audio streaming synchronization. But that last is most important if you have multiple sound zones in your house which you want to have all synchronized to play the same thing at the same time.