orange pi looks very promising

I use ubuntu because my provider has that by default. It’s not my favourite distro these days, but gets the job done.

I had a similar question: https://lemmy.ml/post/12919434

Docker makes sense if you are deploying thousands of machines in the cloud. I don’t think it makes as much sense if you have your own hardware.

Some services do have 1-line installers with docker, so those might be useful. But they usually have 1-line non-docker installers too.