OpenSUSE Aeon is a good example of this in general and I think it is a good example of the way that it is used
mski
We've done this with Home Assistant (on a raspberry pi), and Zwave / ZigBee. Its been working great for years. Also allows for really customizable alerts for different things - and has been super stable.
Not very difficult to setup either - the interface is pretty polished these days!
I've had a pretty good experience with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, with a pretty similar use case / criteria.
I've done my share of tinkering, and while I learned a lot, and enjoyed Gentoo, Arch, Debian, NixOS, and others (Mandrake, Ubuntu), I sometimes I just want get my work done...
With Tumbleweed, there are a few packages that you'd need to install for codecs, but that's easily done via the CLI zypper
package manager with a single command.
I'd definitely recommend checking it out - its been a solid daily driver for almost 3-years now with very few issues, and lets me focus on getting stuff done. I wonder if this is due to their QA build process (OBS)?
Anyway, good luck & have fun whatever you choose!
I'd be curious how well this approach translates to multi-lingual keyboard layouts. For english users, perhaps theres another benefit to non-QWERTY layouts (e.g. Colemak or Dvorak) after all? ... and two factor authentication should remain helpful I presume. Especially physical key methods with no audible characters typed (e.g. Yubikey, Titan, etc.)
Just checked our major urban centre in Canada, and it's around 1:450. As a comparison, that makes New Orleans (1:385) pretty well staffed.
Would be cool to find data covering major urban centres across the world for comparisons.
My keyboard's autocomplete did a terrible job of finishing the sentence for sure... If I kept going it started repeating "good example of this in general" ad nauseum.
But Aeon has been good so far!