To be fair, $600 for 64GB of RAM is a steal in this economy (you could probably sell the RAM alone for $800). So if you want that much RAM and are ok with the rest of the system - go for it. I mostly wanted to point out why I personally would not like such a machine (why I’m “sleeping” on it).

Mine was the equivalent of $660 at the time with 32GB of RAM (excl. HDDs). In this RAMpocalypse it would probably cost around $1k.

I am interested in trying out an Arm/RISC-V PC for a Linux server. However, what stops me from buying almost all of them is that they require you to use a dubious, poorly-maintained manufacturer fork of some Linux distro.I don’t want my hardware to become e-waste when the manufacturer looses interest in 10 months, so running an upstream distro (like Fedora/Debian/NixOS) is a hard requirement for me. It seems that they half-solved that issue for this machine, so that’s actually good progress.

For this particular machine, Jeff Geerling also reported that the idle power draw is 17W. That’s higher than my faster, fully-upgradable mATX AM5 x86 NAS…

Debian also supports “unattended-upgrades”: https://wiki.debian.org/PeriodicUpdates

I actually have it set up the same way on both: Automatically install updates (and restart some services), but don’t reboot. I don’t think it was different/easier on Ubuntu.

Overall, the two distros are very similar for a server application. If you’re already running Debian on your PC, I would also go with that for a server.