I am thinking about buying an old (2014-ish) Intel Mac Mini on eBay. Then throwing Linux on it - they are cheap (~$20 and I like the look of the case). That will allow me to run home-assistant, the MQTT broker and some other stuff on the box.
I don’t really want to mess with Docker, so I am looking at just installing core directly on the Linux system itself.
Is there are recommended Linux Distro that will work best / have the least issues when running HA core directly on the OS (no docker)?
I am wondering about LTS distro’s (such as Ubuntu 24.04.1) but they are a bit behind on packages such as python (currently 3.12.3) so a non LTS distro may be better.