"And it worked—it did the job, recorded stuff, and was fairly okay at motion detection. However, it consumed a significant amount of CPU and drew a lot of electricity for no real reason. You didn’t optimize it.

For me, with 4 4k Cameras + more 1080p cameras, it uses 1.5% to 3% when nobody is viewing the cameras. Of course, it will go up if somebody is viewing the cameras, as it will need to transcode to view it on the web. I wanted to try other alternatives as well on Linux, but I still preferred Blue Iris at the end.

You can find information on optimizing Blue Iris’s CPU usage in this link: Optimizing Blue Iris’s CPU Usage.

https://ipcamtalk.com/wiki/optimizing-blue-iris-s-cpu-usage/

I would Recommend Using Hyper V for linux VM if you are going with Windows

immich is my Top 1

If it weren’t a Docker/Portainer replacement and were solely responsible for security, I would use it. Multiple applications are needed to have all the good security measures that you have implemented in one application.