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

Debian. All day, everyday.

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

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

Debian, I wouldn’t pick another one.

Debian

Proxmox 4 lyf

Home Server: VMware ESXi NAS: Unraid

I don’t have much of a homeserver, its more of an experiment - but I have Fedora IoT as hypervisor OS running a Open Media Vault guest and another Fedora IoT VM for container services.

I’m a big fan of Fedora’s Ostree setup, and have used Silverblue on the desktop for a while now, so IoT makes a lot of sense for me.

I use TrueNAS, mainly because I wanted a solid storage solution. I don’t really need many VMs, so I’m happy to run jails for stuff I need.

I also run a small RPi4 server with a few docker containers (a secondary Syncthing server, TVHeadend server, etc).

If I had a need for VMs, I’d run Proxmox (as I have some experience with it).

If you’re looking for a NAS and don’t want to invest on all disks right now, unraid. Otherwise truenas

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.