What issues are you having with it? I just did this and have found it to be pretty much perfect.
The lack of something like mergerfs. It is okay for plex, because you can add each drive, but not for all softwares. There is unionfs with macfuse, but it is very buggy. Maybe the new fskit backend will improve over time, but not today. I had to modify some docker containers to install and run mergerfs inside of the container.
Docker. You can use orbstack or docker desktop. But both work the same. They create an internal vm with linux and run docker there. This means no gpu acceleration and worse performance in general. So no gpu / ai hardware acceleration in softwares like immich. And I have some softwares running in orbstack and some native on the host (softwares like plex for hardware transcoding). But I would prefer to run all in containers. Maybe the new container software by apple will solve this, but it is at early stages. Far from finish.
Because a mac mini is not standard, there is no way to power control it. I bought a jetkvm, but of course I can’t use the atx adapter to control the power state. This is all fine until macos locks up when you are abroad.
3.1 You need display access to unlock filevault
In macos there is no way to tell why a hdd woke up from sleep. You can’t find the culprit who wakes up your hdds all the time. Pretty annoying.
The smb implementation on macos is shit. And I know for a fact, I am not alone with this opinion.
Macos permission prompts. Not nice if you don’t know why your softwares has no network access, because you opened it via ssh but on the desktop there is a local network permission prompt.
Hardware is expensive. I don’t mean the mac mini itself. I mean thunderbolt accessories.
Launchctl sucks
But there are also some good things:
Power usage is great
The transcoding power is insane. 100Mbit 4k movie? No problem. My 1650 ti I used in the past struggled with it.
But there are also some good things: