Pi’s are about as expensive as a refurbished micro pc. Can i install, run headless and ssh into it.

Yes its possible - you need to install a plain headless debian12 and then run the raspiblitz build script: wget --no-cache https://raw.githubusercontent.com/raspiblitz/raspiblitz/v1.12/build_sdcard.sh && sudo bash build_sdcard.sh -u raspiblitz -b v1.12 -f 0 -d headless