For nextcloud I would recommend using the all-in-one setup, but as far as email you might want to use an already existing solution rather than trying to host it yourself. I would recommend protonmail for your email since all the other common options like Microsoft and Google are not privacy respecting.

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.

At work we use Logseq for notes and we store software licenses in vaultwarden.

I also have all of the docker compose files and other required files in a git repository with a readme per compose stack.