I am looking to build a machine to use for file backups and some light media serving (PhotoPrism, Calibre, and the like). My plan is to take a retired desktop, throw in every old drive I have lying around, and merge them with Greyhole.
I am a seasoned Linux user (in containers or on machines being managed by others). I am comfortable with CLI basics and should be able to use the system entirely over SSH and web UIs, so I am fine without a window manager. What I am not fine with is system administration (and do not want to spend time fixing issues that constantly pop-up).
Ideally, I would want to find a distro that I can install by accepting reasonable defaults, configure my storage and my various applications, create a cron job to periodically update packages and reboot the machine, and the machine will just keep working with no intervention on my part. I realize that that is an impossible goal, but I want to get as close as I can.
Alpine Linux has been my go to OS for things like servers and NAS’s. Its small, rock stable, and can run on basically anything thay has a floppydrive ;-)
I have used Alpine Linux at work and I don’t like the fact that they only have one version of each package in their repo. First of all, that creates a risk that a given version is bad and I cannot go back to a known good version. Also, some times I explicitly want to use an old version of a package. New versions change and remove features.