Thin clients! I “upgraded” from a RPi3 to an HP T630 that I got new off of eBay for $65, including power supply (and case). I was able to upgrade the M.2 storage easily. I use mine as a home server running over a dozen Docker containers. It’s x86 instead of ARM too.
The only bad part was installing Linux. It took a while for me to figure out where the UEFI expected the boot files and documentation isn’t great.
Have you tried Chocolatey? https://chocolatey.org/. It’s a package manager for Windows and works great, much like brew for Mac. Or, if you prefer portable installation of programs without requiring admin, try Scoop (https://scoop.sh/). Of course, I’d rather use paru or yay on Arch, but I’m glad these options exist.
I find it hilarious that Microsoft even suggests these tools on their own GitHub page for the Windows Terminal.