You buy the wrong one(s) and you'll spend many more hours regretting it. I'm actually partial to the ASUS before they even took over the NUC line from Intel.

You buy the wrong one(s) and you'll spend many more hours regretting it. I'm actually partial to the ASUS before they even took over the NUC line from Intel. However it looks like there are off-brands having comparable specs for about half the price of the new NUCs. A second-hand ASUS may be the best deal. There are also "thin clients" from places like Dell or HP that are small, low power, and fanless. These can be really cheap when removed from office buildings in quantity. If you can get by with as little as 4GB of memory and 16 or 32GB of on-board drive space, surplus units like this are cheap because they don't really do much office work on their own or run Windows 11 by design. Drivers can be a problem, even in Windows. I had some Minix Windows 8 minis from our IT guys that I repurposed for scientific use. A single advanced Windows 10 app ran OK and did not overstress the little things, but at the beginning Windows Update did not recognize many of the uncommon mini hardware items. The only way to get all the hardware working was to point Windows 10 to the driver repositories in the original mounted Windows 8 recovery image. They did what I set out to do, but when I tried to set one up as a mobile hotspot, that particular feature was not supported by the hardware.