I'm rocking an older Intel NUC8i5BEK sitting next to a Synology 2-bay NAS. I don't have heavy requirements on performance, I just needed something reliable and

I'm rocking an older Intel NUC8i5BEK sitting next to a Synology 2-bay NAS. I don't have heavy requirements on performance, I just needed something reliable and quiet, low power usage is a plus. It's been pretty solid. For a while I ran ESXi on it, then I decided to switch to KVM (that was a mistake, trying to make the networking sane was damn near impossible), and now I've condensed everything down to just working on a single OS instance so it runs Ubuntu on bare metal. I probably should have stuck with ESXi. Running Home Assistant as HAOS has some conveniences that may be worthwhile depending on how much like you to tinker. But it also runs totally fine in a Docker container and that has it's own upsides.