I thought I’d provide another perspective. I have been using Serviio for almost a year and have gone through 3 configurations. I use the media server daily, but seldom have more than one device streaming at a time. Also, none of my media needs to be transcoded. So processing and throughput are not a big issue.
I started using Serviio with my laptop as an experiment to see how it worked. The laptop was an HP Pavilion with a 4 core i7, 12G RAM, and 256G M.2 SSD. I soon found I liked locally streamed media.
I decided I wanted a server that would be available 24x7, so power consumption was some concern. I got Raspberry Pi Model 3 as a Christmas gift two years ago and thought I’d give that a try. The Pi is a Linux Micro PC with a Quad core Broadcom CPU (Think cheap phone) and 1 G RAM. I added a USB 3.0 500 GB external hard drive. It worked “OK”. A single stream was no issue, but on occasion it would sluggishly respond to menu navigation commands from the Roku clients. I used this configuration for 8 months.
I had a desire to add a 24x7 file/backup server. Since Linux backup software is pretty crude, I found a Windows 10 PRO
Mini PC for less than $200 that seemed perfect- A quad core Pentium, 4GB RAM, 128G SSD, and an internal 2.5” SATA bay that I put a 1T Byte HDD in. I have been using this last configuration for about a month and am extremely happy. Clients are very responsive. Another plus for this box is it uses less than 10 watts.
I agree with Dan that Windows is a simpler installation. I ran into some issues with the Linux installation that these forums helped resolve, but more technical knowledge is required than Windows.