Proxmox is sort of the gold standard for homelab server operating systems. Runs containers and VMs.
If you’re not into Proxmox, look into Fedora Server with Cockpit. Web UI for server management. Fedora CoreOS is an immutable variant of Server that would make more sense for a hypervisor, IMO.
First and foremost, backups. Back up everything and back up often. Immutability can’t do anything for critical hardware failure.
Issues happening on something only running container workloads isn’t common but I think it’s worth the extra little effort to reduce the risk even further. Fedora CoreOS or Flatcar is ideal since its declarative nature makes it easily reproducible. Fedora IOT can get you there too, but it doesn’t use ignition so you’ll be setting the server up manually.
Immutability is good. Declarative configuration is good. Manage cattle, not a pet.
Traditional RAID isn’t very flexible and is meant/easiest for fresh disks without data. Since you’ve already got data in place, look into something like SnapRAID.
Intel Arc A310. They’re $100, support AV1 and powered completely by the PCIe bus. Combine it with Tdarr and you can compress your media library down to half the size easily while still being able to easily stream to any device you have.
Nearly any SBC you’d buy would beat the pants off it. If you’re shopping by price then check out a Libre Computer Sweet Potato or Renegade, or a Friendly Elec NanoPi R2S+. They’re <=$40 and should be able to run at least the services you mentioned. If you have more budget, there are $100 mini PCs on Amazon that are great for self hosting tons of stuff, like a Bmax B1 Pro.
Give webtop a try? Granted I haven’t tried anything heavy on it, but it’s been performant enough for me. Here’s a compose file if it stays formatted correctly:
services: webtop: image: lscr.io/linuxserver/webtop:latest # alpine - xfce # other tags with different bases and desktops: https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-webtop container_name: webtop #security_opt: # - seccomp:unconfined #optional environment: - PUID=1000 - PGID=1000 - TZ=America/Los_Angeles - TITLE=my_desktop #optional volumes: - config:/config #- /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock #optional ports: - 3000:3000 - 3001:3001 restart: unless-stopped volumes: config: {} networks: {}