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Depends what you’re doing with them.
If you’re, for example, streaming multicast video all over the place then you will absolutely need managed switches with IGMP Snooping support.
But if you will only ever have a simple, flat network without the need for traffic management then you can cascade any number of dumb switches with abandon.
ectoplasmosis-
I laid extra ethernet cables in case I want to stream video in the future but I have to admit I don't know the first thing about how it works!
Would it be madness to buy an 8 port, managed switch with PoE, like this:
https://eu.store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-routing-switching/products/unifi-switch-8-60wThen use it alongside a dumb unmanaged switch for the stuff like Hue/Tado/Gigaset bridge which really doesn't need managed or PoE? I could always then buy another managed switch down the line if I actually needed it.
My USG has a socket which can be used as LAN 2 so I think I could plug a second switch into that to avoid daisy chaining and give myself an extra port?
Fox
I think this is one of my questions - do I really need a managed switch?
Short term I think I'd be happy with a dumb one, but longer term I have ethernet cables running down to what will be a whole new bit of the house (kitchen) once we've demolished the back of the house and rebuilt it.
At this point I may well want to connect other things via ethernet down there, in which case I'd need another, smaller, switch. And I read in Networking for Dummies that it's better to have managed switches if you have more than one switch...