Smart home stuff can be incredibly fun and handy, but you have to go into it with a tinkering and very IT-centric mindset. If you’ve already got a homelab set up then running a home assistant VM/container is pretty dead simple. Beyond that, keep as local an ecosystem as you can to reduce friction and improve security. Set up proper vlans, etc. and most importantly, only make smart what you can either live without or effortlessly control WITHOUT the “smart features”. My lights automatically turn on when I get home from work if it’s dark- but if my server is down, I can still just hit a light switch. My camera doorbell still rings as long as the power isn’t out, etc. Yeah it’s work, to set up right, but well worth it if you enjoy tinkering.

I can vouch for Bazzite and always will as long as they keep up the solid work. Running on a laptop (gnome variant for easier fingerprint login) and desktop (KDE, cuz I just prefer KDE day to day). It just works™️.

1000% on the money here. You want encode, decode, calculation, acceleration? They got it. Rock solid, beautiful and simple. You want that shit to actually SHOW UP ON SCREEN? Get the fuck outta here. What do you think nVidia is, a GRAPHICS CARD company!?