Howdy. For years now I've been running a Debian home server on an old Pentium 4 x64 desktop that self-destructed during a power outage when a semi wrapped itself around a utility pole about two blocks from my home. Most of the time I kept it connected via CAT6 and a power cord, no other peripherals, and accessed it via SSH or webmin as needed (ports to both closed at the router, LAN access only).
To replace it, I finally picked up a mini-pc on the cheap via Black Friday sales and was considering changing OS from Debian, but I'm not sure whether it's worth the hassle (quick & dirty would be to clone the old drive to the new system).
The old server hosted personal PHP and NodeJS websites via nginx using dynamic DNS and also household email via dovecot+postfix, but I'm open to trying other packages (especially if there's an less painful alternative for email). I'm not really interested in going back to Apache if I don't have to, and I don't mind pulling and building packages I need via git or something similar.
I'm also fully expecting the answer to be "there's better options out there" but figured it was worth asking. I hope everyone's been enjoying the holiday. 🦃
