That’s how I’ve got mine set up, with OPNsense.

I’ve been using it a few years and I only know about half the stuff that pfSense/OPNsense can do. So I would advise newbies to just make small changes at a time because there’s a whole lot of stuff you can change. It’s worth learning, though. I wouldn’t use anything else for my main firewall/router nowadays.

PfSense and OPNsense are both killer router “out of the box” distros built on BSD. I say this as a Linux user, with little interest in running BSD for my applications, but… Respect to BSD. ✊

ZFS kicks arse. It’s worth learning enough to get a basic array going, with a couple of datasets and encryption. Once you get acquainted with that, you’ll be using it for years to come.

Use an old Pi 3B for running zigbee2mqtt on docker.

I used to run just the Linux version of it but decided to install docker on the Pi so it’s as easy as doing docker-compose pull to update it.

This is so I can control my various lights and switches using Home Assistant.