My household primarily runs Arch and Artix for our desktop OS and never have any issues with it, however we have had no end of issues with our home server* and it often ends up being related to systemd.
I am ideally looking for something that can just be left and updated less frequently that can also run docker containers, ideally using OpenRC but can also occasionally run a package on the host system. I’d prefer something GNU as well.
Please don’t reply with any “systemd works fine for me” or “what is your problem with systemd” like most that a search turns up.
Edit*: Probably should have mentioned that its been on CentOS, Ubuntu and then OpenSuse Leap
I would like to know the problems you’re having with systemd, but since you wouldn’t like to explain…
TBH with all the shit I give Poettering, systemd is a good system for the most part, it’s just ideologically not for me, and it’s also really complicated from people who have worked on it.
With that said, I’d point you towards Alpine. I once ran a server in the cloud with it and have no issues other than if you were to use musl, but if you’re using GNU I don’t think you’ll have such issues.
Why aren’t you trying the BSDs? FreeBSD is quite stable and if you’re going to run VMs anyway, run a couple to host your k8s infrastructure/podman nodes and off you go!