proxmox. i fine its very easy to work with and manage. also proxmox backup server is amazing

Arch. No Window Managers or Desktop Environments. Its easy to work with when no extra fluff is installed.

Debian. All day, everyday.

Home Server: VMware ESXi NAS: Unraid

Proxmox 4 lyf

Debian. I use mostly docker containers and super easy to spin up and manage.

Debian Stable. Clean, easy, and reliable. Upgrades smoothly without drama.

Debian, I wouldn’t pick another one.

Debian, FreeBSD. Proxmox is awesome for hosting VMs, LXC, and Docker Containers (via a VM).

Denian stable, openSUSE Leap

I think it really depends on what you intend to do with it… Many answers here will mention what they use but not why.

In my case I want to have various services installed in docker containers, and I have the skills to manage Linux in console. A very simple solution for me was to use a rock-solid, established Linux distro on the host (Debian stable) with Docker sourced from its official apt repo. It’s clean, it’s simple, it’s reliable, it’s easy to reinstall if it explodes.

Why containers (as opposed to directly on the host)? I’ve done both over several years and I’ve come to consider the container approach cleaner. (I mention this because I’ve seen people wondering why even bother with containers.) It’s a nice sweet spot in-between dumping everything on the host and a fully reproducible environment like nixOS or Ansible. I get the ability to reproduce a service perfectly thanks to docker compose; I get to separate persistent data very cleanly thanks to container:host mapping of dirs and files; I get to do flexible networking solutions because containers can be seen as individual “machines” and I can juggle their interfaces and ports around freely; I get some extra security from the container isolation; it’s less complicated than using VMs etc.

Arch, because I’ve always had a better experience with it than Ubuntu, be it server or desktop. I also daily drive it on my desktops.

It’s so much easier to setup. Only with Docker and MergerFS it’s a command and easily updatable, instead of the PPA setups or bash installs you have to do on Ubuntu. The wiki is still the best.

And it’s way easier to maintain when there’s less stuff.

Alma, Talos, OpenBSD

TrueNAS scale. Why: my main concern is backup and data protection, and TrueNAS offers just that. On top of that it’s flexible enough to build a media suite on top of it, and it’s easy to manage. I could have also gone unRAID, but since trueNAS is free and offer a bit better protection imo (at the cost of flexibility), I picked that

I used unraid last year, excellent experience learning how to use docker + vm in a user-friendly interface.
Now I use debian (installed via debootstrap) headless (docker only).