In terms of hardware, what are some good cost effective resources and what what things might I want to consider differently than what I am used to in both the Mac and Windows worlds? I need smart home management, a plex hub, and photo editing, as well as the usual other stuff.
EDIT: I use Capture One for photo organizing and editing. I have old computers I can repurpose for this endeavor, but they are pretty old. My main thought for this post was looking into what kind of hardware I could consider for building a new Linux system from scratch. I am very much am inclined to switch to Home Assistant,because Siri is dumb as a bag of rocks, and AppleHome does not have the features I want and is extremely buggy. Everything I have currently is in the Apple ecosystem, and my daily driver is an M2 Mac Mini. I am not inclined to put Linux on the Mac Mini at this stage. I use the complete Proton suite for all that stuff. Thanks!
The good thing about Linux is that it’ll run on just about anything. So you can run it on any old PC you have lying around. Although you should consider power consumption.
There are several photo editing software like Dark table and GIMP.
Linux is a first class citizen for Home Assistant.
Plex works fine. Jellyfin is preferred by most.
I honestly can’t stand the Jellyfin UI, and it’s a resource hog, at least on MacOS