Debian and docker. When you’ll have your local server, just go with Proxmox, which is based on Debian. On that you’ll be free to run any Linux flavour as an LXC container. As you are already familiar with it, that’s a no-brainer. The day you decide to play with a raspberry pi, Raspberry-Pi OS is also Debian with very little customisation.

Good.

I use owntracks with a free cloudaqmp plan for the mqtt broker. It felt safer than trying to manage my own mqtt open inf the internet. The data is decrypted and parsed by a dedicated node on my main node red instance.

PR stunt, got to keep some money coming before it all burns to the ground