It’s not high tech, but a door lock with a simple pin pad has been great at my house. Never have to worry about having keys or getting locked out. Just have to change some batteries every six months or so. This isn’t Internet connected, but I see that as a benefit.

It’s not very sexy, but I just use SFTP and filezilla. Filezilla is available for all the major operating systems, and an ssh server is basically required anyways.

I enjoy Ubuntu server. At the end of the day I just want something simple. I run most of my services in docker compose, and zfs for the filesystem.

I feel like the window manager is important, but for newbies I also consider the package manager and overall installation process to be very important.

I’ve had pretty distros that are basically busted after a package fails to install or video drivers are mucked with. An advanced user could fix most of these issues, but this is usually where a new user may go running back to their previous OS.

A good computing experience for me is all my hardware working with minimal fuss and all the software I expect to be available being a few terminal commands away (e.g. steam, developer tools, etc.)