Simple is too vague. The goal is avoiding unnecessary complexity, but not all complexity is the same. For instance, I'm not an audiophile, so I have no investm

Simple is too vague. The goal is avoiding unnecessary complexity, but not all complexity is the same. For instance, I'm not an audiophile, so I have no investment in audio equipment. A Sonos soundbar is, in absolute terms, an extremely complex device; you could measure all the steps to production and the complexity is pretty astounding. In some ways, a consumer product may be more complex because it'll have additional circuitry to provide the "simpler" interface. But that's counting the wrong complexity. It's the interface that I care about, because I'm trying to minimize the number of tasks and things about the device I have to memorize. So now we're studying a different class of entities: tasks I have to both learn and perform, and some amount of information I have to organize. There's also a degree of risk, as the damned thing can break, and I can sink a tremendous amount of time on the phone trying to remedy it, or have to throw it out, which I don't like. I've only used Ubiquiti products a bit, but they seem to have all their own special sauce. And, I'll bet the design tends to assume you recall things you did months ago or take perfect notes. So while I'd probaby go with the Ubiquiti, especially if the defaults just work, I might find it's simpler to set up a Linux box. How? That's advertising a ton of complexity to me, the entire Unix OS. But... I don't have to learn anything new, any configuration goes into a repo, and updating can be automated. That means the marginal complexity is still quite small. Managing complexity, like risk, cost or time, is very much an economic function. And, of course, since there's a limit to the amount of complexity you can manage in your life, a production-possibility frontier naturally emerges from these choices. When you're overloaded, you're dropping unmanageable complexity, most likely unconciously.