I am looking to build a machine to use for file backups and some light media serving (PhotoPrism, Calibre, and the like). My plan is to take a retired desktop, throw in every old drive I have lying around, and merge them with Greyhole.
I am a seasoned Linux user (in containers or on machines being managed by others). I am comfortable with CLI basics and should be able to use the system entirely over SSH and web UIs, so I am fine without a window manager. What I am not fine with is system administration (and do not want to spend time fixing issues that constantly pop-up).
Ideally, I would want to find a distro that I can install by accepting reasonable defaults, configure my storage and my various applications, create a cron job to periodically update packages and reboot the machine, and the machine will just keep working with no intervention on my part. I realize that that is an impossible goal, but I want to get as close as I can.
I run Debian on my NAS, it take some time to configure everything like you want it from the command line, but once it’s done you can pretty much forget about it. You could look into OpenMediaVault and CasaOS if you want to have a WebUI to do the configuration. My personal experience with OMV was not so great but it was a long while back and I was trying to run it on an ARM single-board computer, so it might actually be good on a more standard setup. It’s also Debian under the hood.