The Intel Mac Minis don't have soldered RAM, it can be upgraded, though it is deep inside the device. The M1 Macs have soldered RAM and SSD, but here there is a

The Intel Mac Minis don't have soldered RAM, it can be upgraded, though it is deep inside the device. The M1 Macs have soldered RAM and SSD, but here there is a clear technical tradeoff giving much better performance. Asahi Linux contains device drivers for the M1 Macs, quite a bit of their work has been accepted to the Linux kernel already. GPU drivers are pretty close too. Apple does explicitly allow other OSes to run on their hardware, they explicitly enabled that.