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!

I actively maintain a website with SSH (git clone) does desktops environments like vanillaOS and silverblue allow this?

I switched to Linux a few years ago and I remember how scary it was. No one in my surroundings used Linux back then, therefore I was on my own. I had lots of questions and had to use try and error, more error in the beginning I have to say.

Let's help new comers to the world of Linux to have an easy start, to then dive into the wonderful rabbit hole that FOSS is.