Yes my power supply to mine is 13.7v actually not 12v…

I guess it's time to retire my old Cray 1.  It was getting a little heavy for the rig, I have to admit.  And it was sucking a lot of power....   

 

The network issue I found was mainly a problem with the onboard wireless.  I put an external 1200 Mbs adapter on the powered hub and then everything is instantaneous from 60 ft away.  

The compiling, yes, that does take a long time.  But once it runs, downloading to the SSD and running Ekos can only be marginally better with the NUC.  I see very little lag there. 

I also use a miniPC (mine's AMD not Intel) for my home imaging setup. I find KStars/Ekos to be perfectly comfortable on the Pi4, but occasionally I do lunar and planetary and for high-frame rate video capture the Pi just can't come close. I can get anywhere from 3x to 5x or more frames per second on the miniPC. Once it's out there under the scope there's no point swapping it back out for the Pi.

On the other hand, I use a Pi all the time up at my cabin or on the road because it's so much power efficient. I have no line power at all at the cabin, so everything has to be charged off solar, and I just can't see wasting watts on a miniPC.

I rarely compile anything on the Pi, and just work with the ubuntu repositories. Running KStars is just no trouble at all on the Pi, especially when I'm asleep! The interface is just a little bit laggy compared to the mini, but not so much that it bothers me.

Planning to acquire a mini-PC.

With an external usb wifi adapter, can one create a wifi hotspot for remote setups? Or should I get a travel router instead?

You should be able to do that using the internal WiFi on the mini-PC, but you can also use an external dongle to do it.
I have used either approach and both work. I usually use a dongle to create the external hotspot as a backup, just in case I get frozen out by my Pi4 on the internal network.
I have also used the travel router, but if you are out in the dark, that is just one more thing that consumes battery power.
All of these solutions work.

Thanks, Jose. It finally dawned on me that, although I've always thought of the 'Astroberry hotspot' as being some magic done by Astroberry, the hotspot functionality is probably built into the linux distribution. With the pi I have both wifi interfaces when at home and, of course, only the hotspot when remote.