Probably truenas, recommend true and scale as it’s Debian based not bsd like core is. Makes running VMs much easier and way better hardware compatibility in theory!
Homelab
Rules
- Be Civil.
- Post about your homelab, discussion of your homelab, questions you may have, or general discussion about transition your skill from the homelab to the workplace.
- No memes or potato images.
- We love detailed homelab builds, especially network diagrams!
- Report any posts that you feel should be brought to our attention.
- Please no shitposting or blogspam.
- No Referral Linking.
- Keep piracy discussion off of this community
Definitely not the "easiest", but this is what I use.
easiest/most reliable OS for a small homeserver
Debian stable, skip docker / snap and similar crap, add unattended upgrades.
Debian with docker
If you don't have any experience, then probably FreeBSD imho; Follows unix philosophy, stable, built-in support for ZFS, dns caching, NFSv3 & NFSv4, used as the base system for stuff like OPNsense, freenas and a bunch of other stuff at one point in time or another.
And it's really well documented.
If you already have a set of linux utilities or a certain distro you really like then go for that. But it's almost always going to mix-up user and system installations along with needing to learn new stuff for every distro and hoping it's stable with all the different package managers you will need.
You could have a look at CasaOS.
everyone says Debian but they don't say
how it started: Raspberry pi
how it's going: proxmox