Edit2: OK Per feedback I am going to have a dedicated external NAS and a separate homeserver. The NAS will probably run TrueNAS. The homeserver will use an immutable os like fedora silverblue. I am doing a dedicated NAS because it can be good at doing one thing - serving files and making backups. Then my homeserver can be good at doing whatever I want it to do without accidentally torching my data.
I haven’t found any good information on which distro to use for the NAS I am building. Sure, there are a few out there. But as far as I can tell, none are immutable and that seems to be the new thing for long term durability.
Edit: One requirement is it will run a media server with hardware transcoding. I’m not quite sure if I can containerize jellyfin and still easily hardware transcode without a more expensive processor that supports hyper-v.
I want immutability because I come from a the debian world where everything just works. But I want the benefits of using modern versions of packages.
If you’re running unstable system packages, immutability won’t really save your stability.
So don’t complicate it, and just use Debian with nix and home-manager. That way you have a stable base, and you can create a list of bleeding edge packages that should be installed. In any case it should be essentially only docker + whatever can’t be dockerised.