I have an old laptop that I want to turn into a server, but I want it to be as seamless as possible. I don’t have any knowledge in web hosting, so I’ll use whatever distribution makes it easiest.
Also willing to venture outside of Linux territory to try those NAS-like operating systems. I just want things to work.
I called it old, but the laptop in question actually has decent specs. I want to host a personal searx instance, a forum, nextcloud, and, well, I’d also like to run single-user fediverse instances but I heard that they’re very hard to manage and update so I’m still not sure about that.
I actually started of with arch on my server, and recently moved to Debian. In my opinion, Debian is way more suitable for a server, especially if you want things to “just work”. Especially when installing Nextcloud, I noticed how much more Debian does for you compared to arch, which makes the entire process way easier.
Same reason I’m on Suse now as well. I got tired of tinkering all the time.