HoustonBOFH

If I had it to do over, I would put 2 Ethernet drops on every wall of living space but the bathrooms. And pull strings in every drop. (Conduit to hard ones) You will want a "computer room" for the network stuff, but also NAS, DVR, smart home hub, and more as the needs grow. Dedicated circuit an a place to mound a business class rack mount UPS. (2200 or better) And speaking of power, you should add more than you need. And leave room for monitoring it in the box. If your panel is in the garage, a shelf for another switch may be handy. I have a switch in my house, my detached garage, and my shed...

A retrofit is the cheap way to do it. A smart blind is not cheap...

And me. I am actively looking, but the price is nuts. Especially if you have blinds wider than Ikea supports.

Matter, Zigbee and Zwave are all local control. And on Home Assistant, you can have a dongle for all three. That will open your options quite a bit.

You do know this is selfhosted, right? People tell us that what we do is "not a good idea" all the time.

Depends on your tolerance for tinkering. If you love to tinker, Homesassistant is by far the most versatile. And can be totally local. On the other hand, if you do not want to tinker, Apple Homekit can also be (Mostly) local, and is much easier to set up. Google is not something I would trust. They have a history of shady behavior. Amazon less so, but when the internet is down, so is your house!

This... It is ease vs control. If you have needs inside the box Proxmox has planned for, it is very easy. But if you want to step outside that box, you are in for a world of surprise. I install Proxmox for clients that do not have solid Linux chops. I run KVM/libvirt on my own stuff. And if you need a web front end, oVirt exists...

I used to be all white box, and now I am all business class cast offs... If I lose a motherboard I can get one on ebay or a complete system for next to nothing if it is common like Dell. And now I just treat the boxes like cattle rather than pets. One dies and I move the hard drive to a new one.

This is incorrect and bad advice. A Dell or Lenovo business class motherboard will not bolt into an ATX case, nor connect to an ATX power supply.

I wouldn't recommend it to my friends, maybe techie friends, but it is so hard to configure.

I hear ya, but some of the new stuff is worse! It will get better, but then there is the next hurdle; stability. Zoneminder can run for months with no baby sitting... Other stuff, not so much. But I keep watching, and hoping!

I am running Zoneminder. I have played with Frigate and it is not really production ready. And Zoneminder, while not fancy, works every time and has some of the best still pictures of anything out there. I will keep looking at the next new thing, but I am not shutting off Zoneminder until something is solidly batter.

Thanks. I want a fallback for problematic mail servers (Microsoft) only, and do not want to pay the tool to the people causing the problem. :)