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.