Completely new to Home Assistant

I am not sure if you have seen this, but it might be helpful to understand the different installation methods:

Home Assistant Installation Methods - Community Guides - Home Assistant Community (home-assistant.io)

I am not sure what is possible on a Mac mini, but you may consider switching to using the Home Assistant OS or Supervised. There is no way to use add-ons if you don’t have one of those installations. If you installed using Docker, you can set up the equivalent containers yourself. There are several posts in the Community Guides section of the forum that explain how to install Home Assistant in various ways. You may wish to have a look through these and see what might be best for your hardware and level of experience.