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?
I want Arch because I'm currently most familiar with it; it's what's running on everything else in my house. Mine is the sort of brain that purges information that I don't use, and the worst case for me is some little box running somewhere in the house with a distro I'm not familiar with which develops a hiccup. Then I have to spend a day with a browser trying to figure out the special snowflake commands needed to troubleshoot and fix whatever went wrong. Because it's invariably a dependency issue, and that's invariably specific to the distro package manager, and that's dicking around with tools I never use because that distro is running on exactly one of the 9 computers I maintain and I usually never touch it.
If you've seen one Linux you've seen them all. The big difference is that busybox is much more lean
This is absolutely not true. Package managers make a huge difference. There's a big difference between rolling release distros and non. Some distros don't use systemd, and dinit is vastly different from s6. Distros that use NetworkManager have different tools and processes for getting online than ones that use connman, which are different than netctl.
In fact, the only time Linux distros act the same is when they share parentage. Ubuntu is mostly Debian (but is still pretty different), and EndeavourOS is mostly interchangeable tool-wise with Arch. But even then, if you are familiar with Arch and get dropped into Artix - which derives from Arch - you're mostly fucked.
I have to hard disagree with you on that point. LFS is nothing like CentOS in any way that matters.
Except anything that is widely used follows the same system. Everyone uses systemd and package managers work fundamentally in the same way. (Not that you would want to use a package manager or systemd in a embedded context)
Arch is not going to fit in a cheap device. Those devices have limited flash that has limited writes and your ram is going to be limited. You want a static system that only has what you need. You can build a system with buildroot that will fit in a few mb of flash.