Proxmox with Debian LXC containers. The most natural transition from Raspberry Pi OS which is a Debian flavor

Un-smarting our home is indeed my current concern if I would pass suddenly. It’s mostly usable manually but most switches would continually try to connect to WiFi and mqtt. I rather hope have my teenager son be able to take over if need be. My passwords could be accessed by my wife anytime but I’m not sure she realises it, it would be to be documented.

If your motherboard has TPM 1.2, you can go for it it works fine for me and that’s more resources than most current entry level hardware in mini PC