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.
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.