As an European I hope we can capitalize on this, Russia is cut off from western suppliers and the US is cut off from... Probably everyone? Time to manufacture! Better not let the Chinese have the whole pie.
People are interesting, "average" is a misleading concept, you can find quirks and intriguing oddities in pretty much anyone. Perhaps you're frequenting the wrong circles in regards to what interests you.
If you take charge of maintaining this system, maybe it would be easier to install HA supervised in a docker container and have another container for wireguard+syncthing.
A pi5 with 8gb should be enough unless your parents' HA is an hypertrophic installation with hundreds of devices.
I had an embedded Celeron server, passively cooled with 1 hard drive and 2 SSD which used to idle in the range you mentioned, measured at the outlet... It had a random PSU that came with the mini case it was in.Realistically, how low do you aim to go? Disks for example add a lot of wattage.
I'm sure he doesn't know your family as well as you do, but as for jellyfin, that's exactly what you do, open it in a browser and stream, I don't understand what's your objection to that
I do keep trying, but I miss what I'm used to. I've tried a VM but it's too slow, and I fought with GPU Passthrough but gave up. I do hope the whole Trump situation pushes the EU to support Linux more, but I'm not holding my breath.
And then remove part of it a year later when it transfers to him