I run my home server with Debian and docker.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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If you want the machine to just work and not require or encourage you to fool around with it all the time, debian is the answer. Other than installing security updates, you don't have to think about it.
+1 for Debian. It just works like advertised and with no fuss.
Maybe truenas.
Personally I just run proxmox at home with zfs for my array, then everything lives in a few vms / containers.
The reason that I was favoring Greyhole over ZFS is that I want to assemble a large, redundant storage volume out of a bunch of mismatched old disks and swap them out as they fill up or fail. I know it is very possible to do it with ZFS, but it seemed to not be the general use case and complicated.
Using unreliable hardware seems at odds with your "just want it to work" requirement.
Yes, but perfectly reliable hardware is impossible and every small gain in reliability drastically increases the price. Luckily, most hardware can be "fixed" by replacing the malfunctioning part. The only part that is not easy to replace is hard drives. For data disks, I have guides giving me step by step institutions on how to rebuild off of replicas. With the OS disk, I am depending on hopes and taking notes while installing.
Broken software is tricker to replace. I can uninstall and reinstall it, but I have to be careful to avoid catastrophic data loss. Also, broken software generally means a bad release, so I have to revert and periodically upgrade/revert to check if the issue has been resolved. And running old versions of one part of the system can cause incompatibility in other parts.
Your os disks should be raid 1. I'd recommend a pair of onboard nvme or cheap ssds for OS. That's the part you don't want to be fighting with if something does go wrong.
It's trivial to replace a drive on zfs if one fails.
Hardware and software are both really reliable these days. If you're running something like proxmox then you also get easy snapshots and rollbacks.
I use Open media vault. It's more or less a turn key file server.
I run Debian on my NAS, it take some time to configure everything like you want it from the command line, but once it's done you can pretty much forget about it. You could look into OpenMediaVault and CasaOS if you want to have a WebUI to do the configuration. My personal experience with OMV was not so great but it was a long while back and I was trying to run it on an ARM single-board computer, so it might actually be good on a more standard setup. It's also Debian under the hood.
Unraid its simple when you have some mismatching drives
Debian Stable. Debian is what you choose when you don't want to fuck with it.
All my servers run AlmaLinux. Install docker, openzfs etc. as needed. AlmaLinux offers a very solid starting point.
Alpine Linux has been my go to OS for things like servers and NAS's. Its small, rock stable, and can run on basically anything thay has a floppydrive ;-)
I have used Alpine Linux at work and I don't like the fact that they only have one version of each package in their repo. First of all, that creates a risk that a given version is bad and I cannot go back to a known good version. Also, some times I explicitly want to use an old version of a package. New versions change and remove features.
I use OpenMediaVault. Took a little bit of effort to install Docker, but that lets me toss up most self-hosted services on a whim.