I was going through this process about a year ago. I ended up settling on the Protectli V1410 (Intel N5105 and 4 Intel I226-V 2.5Gbps ports) because: a) I wanted coreboot, b) I was a little wary of lesser-known Ali Express sellers c) Protectli seemed like a decent company and I felt good about supporting people investing in an open source firmware (minus proprietary blobs which you can’t do much about). None of that was strictly necessary, and you probably would be fine just going with a cheaper NUC or mini PC. I would definitely second some of the other comments on avoiding Realtek NICs though.

Just in case anyone else is running into this issue, after many months (and updates to Heroic, the Paradox Launcher, and Linux Mint) I was still having issues with this (though no specific libGLU errors) when I stumbled on another post that mentioned multisampling. My laptop has both an integrated and dedicated GPU and I guess this sometimes causes issues? The solution seems to have been going into settings.txt in the .var/com.heroicgameslauncher.hgl/.local/share/Paradox Interactive/Europa Universalis IV GOG/ and swapping multi_sampling from 4 to 0. Definitely don’t understand why this works (though will try to dive more into it), but figured I’d follow up with what ended up working for me!

Checked the logs and it didn’t have any insight into the error that I could make out, so the hunt continues!

Thank you! I actually don’t even need to install with the offline installers to launch the game; if I just navigate to where it was installed by Heroic and manually click the executable it will launch properly. I just wanted to get it working through the launcher to hopefully be able to run multiplayer (and maybe have a slightly easier time with mods?) And honestly, it’s just been driving me nuts not to be able to get around this sandboxing in some way. But appreciate your help!

Thank you! I gave it a shot and it still crashed (though it showed a different crash screen, so I think that’s progress? Also if I left the Paradox crash reporter open for long enough it started to play the soundtrack, which was nice).

Thank you! Just to make sure I am following correctly, for your LXC running PBS, it sounds like you used a privileged container on Proxmox itself, right (vs. an LXC on TrueNAS)?

Thanks for this! I guess that settles my case deliberation at least. But man, getting all the things you mentioned for $170 on eBay is crazy good!!! I must just really need to dig in there a bit deeper (it’s gonna be too easy to go broke with home networking as a hobby otherwise lol). I guess so long as I am memtesting my RAM and burning in drives right after getting them I should be okay. I think I also am overindexing on trying to get my power draw as low as possible instead of really doing the math out and seeing how long I’d need to be running something 24/7 before the power savings ends up outweighing the price differential. But thanks again!

Thank you! The case rec is super helpful actually, I was considering the Fractal Design Define R5 (though I wasn’t sure how to feel about potentially spending the same amount on my motherboard as my case, but people seem to swear by it), so it’s great to have confirmation they’re actually worth it. I had given PC Part Picker a shot, but it seems like it doesn’t quite catch the ECC memory support for some of the AMD systems (maybe because they’re unofficial?) I will give it another shot though, and thanks again!

Thanks for this! The jet engine sound level and higher power draw were both what made me a little wary of used enterprise stuff (plus jumping from never having a home server straight to rack mounted felt like flying a little too close to the sun). And thanks also for the epyc rec; based on other comments it sounds like maybe pairing that with dual 3090s is the most cost effective option (especially because I fear you’re right on prices not being adjusted downward; not sure if the big hit Nvidia took this morning because of DeepSeek might change things but I suppose that ultimately unless underlying demand drops, why would they drop their prices?) Thanks again for taking the time to respond!