The shift to small, single-purpose devices (wonkish)

[brian (Brian Luczkiewicz)]

Roon Nucleus appears to be a custom built Intel i7 based machine running, I guess, Debian Stable kitted with the server package list. Funny thing, I have exactly the same SW configuration running in a FreeNAS 11

I realize that this is just a guess, but it’s pretty far from the truth. There are fundamental and structural differences between general purpose linux distributions like Debian and RoonOS. You might find the Nucleus White Paper interesting.