Go the route of DietPi. It’s free and you can make a donation to them if you want. Their support is free.
Hardware, well yes more powerful could be seen as best, but it’s single core performance that matters most with Roon.
My repurposed Dell SFF i5-8500T, 32gb unit holds its ground with Roon. Over 13k albums, ~180k tracks. The latest production build does seem a little slower than before .net 10. But I mainly use LMS.
Buying silly priced hardware and paying for a Linux distribution to run Roon Server is not required.
I would just stick with ROCK.
The underlying Linux that Roon Server is going to use, is the same, just optimized to run Roon Server, nothing more.
One less platform to manage
Sorry about your NUC, that’s unlucky. The GEEKOM A9 (HX 370) is definitely more powerful than a NUC11, so for Roon Core (especially with no DSP) it’s more than enough. You won’t really gain sound quality, but you do get a lot more headroom and future-proofing. AudioLinux works fine, but it’s not as simple as ROCK. ROCK is basically install-and-forget, while AudioLinux needs a bit of Linux comfort for setup and tweaks. So it really comes down to this: ROCK = easiest and stable, AudioLinux on GEEKOM = more flexible but a bit more hands-on.
I’m not going to weigh in on techno-spiritual debates about the subtle advantages of one element over another. As a general technical matter, almost any mainstream distribution of Linux will handle Roon just fine. Run Debian (which I do) if you’re conservative and don’t really like being on the bleeding edge. Run Ubuntu to get features sooner, but for this use-case, I don’t think it matters. AudioLinux is a stripped-down version of Linux that eliminates as much unnecessary demand on the system as possible, and that is never a bad thing, but you do have to pay for it. I run Roon under Debian on a headless Lenovo Tiny computer. It has worked flawlessly ever since I set it up. It just means that Roon supports Roon, and I support the server.
Good luck with your technical investigation. Every transition is an education!
@Philip_Holt - Thanks, actually I’m leaning towards DietPi. And I’ve already ordered a Geekom A9 HX370 at $1,259 currently, with 1tb SSD & 32Gb. It’s probably overkill, but my 250K+ tracks on a 24TB USB HD, provides a decent database workload, so why not go with perhaps a robust PC upfront.
As I understand it, DietPi is a “tuned” minimal layer on Debian. Given it appears to have guided menus & scripts, for a Linux neophyte, that sounds good to me. For no use other than a Roon server and monitoring the PC, DietPi appears to be a good starting and perhaps ending point for me.
I however know nothing about how upgrades to Roon and DietPi will affect the longer term running of a DietPi Roon server. My guess is that these instances shouldn’t be too often or concerning. But a guess, is obviously just that!
Not at all, most likely. Roon officially supports Roon Server on Linux, and Roon Server is quite self-contained, it doesn’t need many specifics from the OS except a bunch of reasonably modern libraries that any decent Linux has. (And DietPi being a minimal Debian derivative with some add-ons, it’s very mainstream)
Indeed. I have been running Roon Server (and other services) on DietPi for two and a half years now during which time I have kept everything up to date without issue. This has involved nightly apt (the Debian package manger) updates, distribution updates (e.g. from DietPi 10.3 to 10.4 etc) whenever they are presented (typically about once a month) and, on two occasions, an underlying Debian update (Bullseye to Bookworm and Bookworm to Trixie) all completely without issue (although I tend to delay the Debian updates for a few months until I know that they will not cause issues).
Roon Server updates automatically (or not) just as with any other platform.
DietPi can be configured to automatically apply package updates but DietPi distribution updates are not done automatically. Instead, there is a script (‘dietpi-update’) that can be manually run to update DietPi to the current version of the distribution. When you open a terminal on DietPi, a banner is presented which will tell you if there is a new DietPi version available.
When the underlying Debian distribution is updated, DietPi provides an additional script to perform that update which, on the two occasions I have used such scripts, have worked flawlessly.
- Sounds good!!