n0nce thanks for taking the time to make the guides they are very useful as im learning the rest of how bitcoin operates. I think i like baremetal as opposed to arm is there a benefit? What about Mac Mini the latest versions with 16g of ram? i prefer mac os i know its a walled garden but most things are just done right in the os.
You're confusing some terms here. Bare-metal refers to installing software directly on the base OS without any virtualization layer like a VirtualBox VM or Docker.
ARM is a processor architecture; used for instance in Raspberry Pi SoCs, but also in Apple mobile chips and lately the M1 and M2 families of laptop and desktop chips.
You absolutely don't need a Mac Mini with 16GB to run a full node. Something cheap with 8GB totally suffices. For a server application like a Bitcoin full node with Electrum and Lightning on it, I do recommend sticking to Linux. If you want to use that Mac Mini for personal stuff, too, you may want to look into running the Bitcoin stuff in a VirtualBox VM with OpenSUSE.
I'm hopeful i will get to do my first lightning transaction sometime tonight! everything is done except RTL doing it on futurebit for now but will probably migrate it to a thread ripper that i have sitting for the past 2 years or is that overkill?
You installed Bitcoin Core and Core Lightning on your Futurebit Apollo? How is it going?
If you have the Apollo, a Mac Mini and a Threadripper-based PC, I'd absolutely recommend leaving the node on the Apollo (Orange Pi 4), as long as you installed custom OS like described
in my guide.
It pulls the least amount of power and runs Linux by default. So it's kind of an easy choice.