Intel NUC is a little but quite powerful computer with very nice price tag.
Some are priced under $150US as BOXNUC7CJYH1 model without Hard Drive or RAM.


Installing FreeBSD is pretty straight-forward process. The only issue encountered was disabling a "Secure Boot" in BIOS. With Secure Boot enabled NUC would not boot from USB.

We used FreeBSD 12.1 amd64 installer image.
download.freebsd.org/ftp/..
and installing from USB flash:
www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US..

FreeBSD was selected over Linux for the reason we needed a server with solid support and easy software installation.
It will be used as a scanning server with SANE installed. SANE installation was as simple as:

portmaster takes care of all dependencies.There's no place like ~

Accessing two USB scanners at the same time using SANE:
www.codemacs.com/other/an..There's no place like ~