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.
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.