I tried it earlier this year and it was nice, but lack of automatic transaction importing was a deal-breaker for me. It’s so tedious to go through all of your various accounts and run exports, especially considering just how shitty most bank/credit/etc UIs are.

They’ve been off and on working on or talking about Plaid support, which would probably solve all or most of my complaints (so I’m following the GitHub thread to get notifications): https://github.com/actualbudget/actual/issues/898

I keep my docker container updated and every few months take a peak to see if there are any notable improvements, but not really going to touch it until that feature gets added.

A Shield TV is probably overkill for you and the recommendations of a pi would do just fine, but if it’s in budget I say go for the Shield TV. Mine is nearly 8 years old and I haven’t had a single issue, streams 4k HDR, and runs so much better than any of the crap that comes with even the newest of TVs.

If they’re not technical and you don’t feel like playing family help desk, you can’t go wrong with either synology or qnap. The downside with them is the hardware is just barely powerful enough for a NAS. If they start to get into self-hosting at all – pihole, home-assistant, minecraft servers, jellyfin, etc – they’ll quickly run into limitations.

If they’re somewhat technical but not a Linux guru, I’d add Unraid (slackware based, but 100% UI-driven) to the list. I’ve been running it for years and it’s been great. It makes running docker/VM a breeze on top of the hardware-agnostic setup of mixed drives that makes upgrading slowly over time painless.

I run Arch btw

I don’t know if you were trying to be funny but that got a smirk out of me.

while I appreciate everyone naming their favorite companies, this is the only real answer to the question. It doesn’t matter at all which registrar you use, it’s about brand recognition, support, add-on services, and cost.

[source: friend founded his own (now defunct) registrar and I would help out. Even when a registrar goes out of business there’s no real risk, as there are plans in place to hand off customers to other sites]

You make a good point, but OP’s pick is still a really good choice. In early 2020 my old desktop became the new home server: i7-6700K w/ 32gb ram. It’s been going strong every day since. Unraid with Jellyfin, pihole, HAOS, and like 20 other containers running. I generally serve untranscoded 4k hevc videos locally, but I tossed in an old geforce 900 series for both on the fly transcoding as needed (honestly, it’s rare if ever) and for tdarr.

I have something similar to this with my kitchen setup: I have two motion sensors on either end of the island. I have 2 “bright” light fixtures (hooked up via Zooz smart switches – these can be dimmable) and one middle light fixture (smart bulb with the switch left on because the switch is in an awkward spot that I never use anyway).

If motion is triggered and it’s between 5pm - 11pm, turn on all 3. If it’s between 11-4am, just use the dim light. And then after X minutes of inactivity, kill the lights. You could easily add in brightness levels and fades.

I used to have it set to factor in the lesser of sunset or a helper I created (“is it cloudy?”) that read the lux value of my weather station, but in the end I just liked the predictably of set times.

All that to say it would be no problem for you to add dimming based on motion + time of day. Grab the Zooz Dimmer and replace your switches with that and grab whatever regular dimmable light fixtures your wife likes. In your automation set your lights to go on at full brightness during sunset, dim at a specific time, then have it adjust brightness when motion is triggered, and then back to the dim setting after a delay.

You can also set a transition time, so lights on at sunset, transition from 100% to 30% over 3 hours, etc.

Another suggestion: with the HA app on your phone, use that to detect if you’re coming home and turn the lights on full for a few minutes as you pull in.