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.
Have you considered installing Proxmox? That way you can then test as many distros as possible and even play a bit with containers. I configured it recently and I’m having a lot of fun being able to take snapshots and then doing crazy things with an easy way to recover from my failed experiments.
Seconding Proxmox. I use it both in an enterprise setting and at home on my self-host rig.