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’d throw an option out for Suse but if you really want as little OS as possible Arch Linux.
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.