@2psyop I love Roon’s interface.
I had a spare, 10+ year old mac mini (I had upgraded the hard drives to SSD, but the CPU was the original), on which I installed Linux and Roon. Good enough to run Roon without any problems. And since I was going to donate it anyway, it didn’t cost anything.
I think pretty much any old Intel hardware will be fast enough, provided you’re not running a lot of Roon’s DSP or something like HQPlayer... The Roon website states "Intel Core i3 with 8GB" as the minimum requirement, whereas my old mac mini has an 8 core i7. These requirements could change in the future, of course.
your not buying a nucleous for the hardware, but for the software.
Indeed. The software is downloadable for free on the Roon website. Spend your money elsewhere in your system.