Need advice, should i buy x86 or ARM based hardware?

If you want to paralyze yourself with choices, read through this megathread on the Topton-like devices: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/topton-jasper-lake-quad-i225v-mini-pc-report.36699 The consensus (sort of) is that CWWK is probably the actual manufacturer of all these devices regardless of branding, and are pretty good people to deal with (search for "cwwk store" on aliexpress).

I bought one of the barebones Celeron N5105s with 4x 2.5 Gbe NICs for US$140 last November, added $40 in SSD and 8G RAM to complete the package. It's used for experiments only thus far (a PC-Engines APU2 Jaguar AMD x86 box with 22.03 is my main router). The N5105 has been quite solid running the SNAPSHOT builds, and since we only have a 300/15 ISP connection, I've relegated it to "dev-only" status, but if I ever get a faster connection, it's ready to go.

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