Well, I bought one.

It arrived today. Took a couple of hours to put together, which was made a little more complicated by the instructions assuming it came with t-nuts that could be inserted into the side of the rails rather than having to be slid in from the ends, so they kept telling me to put shit together which I then had to take apart to put the t-nuts in.

The lack of Linux software is a bit of a hurdle. So far all I've done is write a little program that lets me type gcode commands and see it's response, from which I was able to see that it's running "grbl 0.9i" and then look up what gcode it supports. I then made that program able to send files and wrote a simple one that just drills some holes for an IC, which I then drilled into a piece of cardboard.

Before I can do anything more interesting I'm going to have to write more software.