Who knows how long this will last (overproduction of some gens of chips) but if you want to run a proper home server with a bunch of workloads including Roon, the costs are getting absurdly low. I just picked up a GMKtec K10 with 13i9 and 64GB of DDR5 / 1TB SSD for $579. But if you want to really get a deal, get one of these Minisforum refurbished MS-01’s with 12-i5 for $294 with coupon and put in your RAM & SSD of choice - they’re in a US warehouse. It truly is a time to be spoiled by choice. I’m not a Linux guy, but with ChatGPT as a guide and a bunch of tutorials, I got proxmox installed, Roon in an LX container, Plex in an LX container, Home Assistant in a VM, Pihole, unbound, all the things - took me a few hours. Contemplating setting up a cluster just for the hell of it because I’m learning stuff.
I know, I know, I keep saying elsewhere that the GMKtec N97 and N150 are the best ROCK(MOCK) machines out there for 90%+ of the people, because they’re so inexpensive and simple. And they are, I stand by it. But those machines got me going on a journey of discovering mini-PCs and how fast things are moving and costs dropping. I wouldn’t want to be making Raspberry Pi’s right now except for the real hobbyist base - base model refurb mini PCs can do a lot more for, well maybe not less yet, but it’s close. Maybe we’ll see a version of Ropieee / RooExtend for Linux before too long and see these as streaming endpoints. It’s dirt simple to run RoonBridge on them (even if you wanted to run them in Proxmox and pass through the USB), but that is probably beyond a lot of people (it would have been way way beyond me a couple months ago).