We live in an old house (~350 years old at the creation's time of this page) and when starting some house works after moving in, we had to think about putting in place some home automation.
And we did not.
But still, some aspects are interesting and I keep reading about this topic... and wish to put some things in place.
As for the solutions: Low consumption is the key. Reduced costs as much as possible. Zero performance or Nerd-only-usability are no go.
Software
Home Assistant
Gladys
Jeedom
Domoticz
OpenHAB
Hardware
Very first wished host must have been a Raspberry Pi like device.
Given the recommended configurations (based on the pre-installed Home Assistant Blue, Green, Yellow; or the Gladys's Mini-PC Beelink S12 Pro), I had to reorient myself towards more powerful devices.
An idea of mine was to buy twice the very same configuration for Home Assistant and Gladys and then compare them, both running in parallel... but this was a bit overkill and from a financial point of view, not a valid move.
The fact that my laptop had a broken screen help to find the rather perfect solution to run both in parallel, but on the same host.
Moreover, it happened to offer an additional alternative to the other virtualization servers of the list.
Operating System
This is the way I intend to attempt to setup all of this.
I didn't have a use case yet for Nix-OS.
I'll already use Debian on another device, and Arch is already on my lightweight machine... So, let's play with a new alternative (but nothing unstable :) ).
And this is how the whole thing should look :
