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.
My home server runs on a laptop that’s running Manjaro. Does that mean I recommend Manjaro? Nope, then why do I use Manjaro? Because it’s the same OS I have on my personal computer so it makes it easier to maintain two of the same than different OSs, so my suggestion would be whatever you’re using on your main rig, and if you don’t use Linux on it then whatever you feel more comfortable, there’s not going to be a major difference between distros in their capabilities, but there is going to be a major difference in your willingness to maintain a system you’re not familiar with.
Same for arch. Don’t use it for a server. It deleted php 7 and upgraded to 8 which broke my WordPress website.
I never moved away to something more stable but it does cost me more effort than just going with Debian.
For example, I use several Raspberry Pi as servers and have Arch installed on all of them. And it simply works. I therefore do not consider such sweeping statements that Arch cannot be used for servers to be correct.
It depends on the individual use case.
For example, was Wordpress already compatible with PHP 8 at the time? Because I also use a webspace at uberspace.de. CentOS is used there and not Arch. Some time ago, I wanted to install Hedgedoc there, but it didn’t work because node.js 20 was standard in my case, but Hedgedoc only supported version 18 or even 16 at the time. So it would only have helped to define a lower version as the default. This would have meant that another tool that required a higher version would no longer have worked.
Just use docker, relying on the packages inside your distro for that is a way of having a bad time. What if WordPress needed PHP 7 but Nextcloud needed 8? Or something similar. There’s a reason containerization is a thing, and the host OS is mostly irrelevant.