I normally go for odroid for these sorts of things but have had a bad run recently.
What I want is a bare minimum computer I can hook to some externally powered speakers and run snapclient on. That's it; nothing else will run on it. It's part of a project to get audio casted into every room.
Arch, because I'm most comfortable with Arch; I don't have to learn any new peculiarities; Alpine would also work. deb and rpm-based distros aren't options.
It needs WiFi, or the ability to take a module. And of course an RCA out jack for the audio plug.
Cheap would be nice.
I have no experience with Pis, but there's a bewildering variety of them with varying capability; many don't come with WiFi, and some not even with audio out. It's frankly hard to tell what's the minimum Pi I can get away with for my use case, and what components I need to add on. I don't want to have to become a Pi expert just to get one device for this.
IME getting Arch running on odroid is a bit of work, and Mint or whatever they sell on the micro SD cards may be the worst distro I've had to deal with in recent years.
I'd love to try a RISCV board, but I feel like that's just asking for a whole different level of protracted tinkering to get what I want.
Basically, if I could get a plug-and-play Arch SBC with WiFi and audio out, even if I had to boot it first on ethernet the first time to set it up, for a good price, that'd be ideal.
What are good options here? So many Pis are for tinkering or as project components. Odroid seems like they're only half-heartedly doing business. RISCV is bleeding edge and still sounds fussy and iffy except for very specific problem domains. Micro PCs like Trigkey or Beelink are full desktop replacements and are both overkill for my use, and too expensive.
What do y'all advise?
A Raspberry Pi 3b is about as plug-and-play with wifi and audio out as you can get, for $35 usd. 64-bit, Arch ARM has an image for it, the support and community are the absolute best you can get in an SBC, pretty much anything you could possibly want to do with it will have a blog writeup guide that sonebody's already done. If a 4-core 1GHz processor and 1GiB of memory are suitable for the software you want to run, that'd be my go-to.
Yeah, this sounds perfect. Someone else suggested the 3B+ as it also has a WiFi module. It's not than powerful enough; it's literally going to be sitting on a shelf connected to the AUX input of a dual-speaker radio thing we got for xmas one year, and running snapclient and little else.