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

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

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

Proxmox 4 lyf

Debian, I wouldn't pick another one.

Debian. All day, everyday.

Home Server: VMware ESXi NAS: Unraid

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

Truenas scale and xcpng

I tried Unraid - left due to annoyance of losing server function when I had to take drive arrays down and only scrubbing on demand

Went to True Nas scale for the promise of ZFS and liked it, but had issues with the interface and getting GPU passthrough to containers was impossible.

Ended up ditching my large server case (still have it - anyone need a large 12 drive 3U case with a big threadripper and bunch of ram - hit me up) and switched to a NUC running ubuntu with portainer managing my dockers on it and all my data stored on a Synology NAS.

Alma, Talos, OpenBSD

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.

If you want a beautiful front end for docker containers

CasaOS/ZimaOS Cosmos-server Unbrel

Otherwise

• proxmox
• truenas
• unraid

Ubuntu server, some bash scripts, and a docker install. KISS

NixOS

Ubuntu LTS server. I chose it because it's got good support both in community and enterprise support. Also it's pretty simple to use and almost forgot it's got zfs built in.

Proxmox, truenas

VMware esxi. The only one I tried, and it works amazing.

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.

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 went from freenas to unraid and couldn't be happier.

Unraid has a ton of really amazing features, it's super easy to use, the docker support is great (freenas didn't have docker support when I left), the parity drives are magic, and just being able to slap random disks of any size in your NAS is great.

I've had a few issues with freenas, but I've never had a single issue with unraid. That shit just works.

Edit:

I have a live stream porn downloader, that'll watch when people come online and start capturing the stream. I don't want this to be part of my system and putting strain on it, so with unraid I'm able to put disks in my system and use a plugin called unassigned devices, which allows me to add them to the system, but have them be separate from my main array.

That's why I just love unraid. The flexibility is great.

Truenas for the nas, proxmox for everything else

Proxmox, TrueNAS, Ubuntu server.

Proxmox, unraid, pihole ftw

I was an ESXi fan for over a decade until I found proxmox.

Now I use a combination of VMs and Linux containers.

I use containers for:

Pihole, Ubiquity WiFi Controller, Plex, Audio Bookshelf, imfluxdb, etc. And VMs for Home Assistant and Untangled.

https://ramblingnonsense.substack.com/p/a-journey-from-esxi-to-proxmox-in

Ubuntu server, everything on it runs with docker, nothing beside docker is installed, because of this i use rolling release instead of LTS

NixOS. Only been running it on that server for a couple of weeks now, but so far I'm happy with it.

I like being able to manage almost every aspect of the system from a single declarative configuration file.

I don't do any fancy NAS and/or RAID stuff though. Just the OS living on an nvme, and a logical volume running across two spinning disks. If I need direct file access I use scp, but the storage is more for jellyfin and a syncthing node.

Home serVER? Like ONE? 😅

Proxmox 👍👍👍

Homeserver? Surely you mean home serverS.

Proxmox, unraid. Ubuntu server vms

good support keeping the compatible packages readily available is one of the feature you might do well with

Proxmox because it's just Debian with a pretty UI for QEMU

I'm liking it a lot more than ESXi - it's just better honestly

vSphere 8

Ubuntu server LTS

AlmaLinux + portainer. Cockpit-machines for vms.

I use Rocky Linux, since it is similar to my my company uses but I don't have to worry about developer keys/license to use the os

Fedora server + cockpit

solid and simple admin web panel with containers support (via plugin)

I use OpenMediaVault, with a Docker plugin and a few containers for Plex and Transmission. Although, I don't actually remember if OpenMediaVault is the OS itself, or running on top of it, which is a testament to stability, I suppose.