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!
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!