Old laptop or mini PC is the way to go.
Old laptop also gives you a screen, keyboard and battery (UPS) which is cool.
Discussion
Sure. Replace go to the computer store and buy a Raspberry Pi with visit eBay or Amazon or FB marketplace or whatever and search for a used laptop or Intel NUC. It's still a pain in the ass. If it wasn't, the whole world would be running them.
What's a pain in the ass is when I fire up a system designed to be user friendly and I spend the next forever wondering why on earth they made the configuration decisions they did, and try to figure out where they've hidden this configuration away from me to protect me from myself.
No thanks, just gimme the tarballs.
I went overkill for my node bwecause i run alot of things on Start9
Desktop Gaming PC
32GB RAM, 2TB NVME, Ryzen 5000
I have been explicitly avoiding anything with a battery as I see no reason just to kill it for the sake of doing so.
Maybe I should learn more about power consumption, and maybe things are just a lot better now than they used to be, but running a laptop plugged in 24/7 turned the one I had in college into a pretty useless machine in only a few years.