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.
Several comments specifically talked about VMs for the various apps. And frankly I’m not super familiar with the limitations of containerizing apps either. That’s part of why I was looking for an immutable os + flatpacks / snaps - it’s much more similar to a normal linux system just organized in a way to not break shit.
Use containers (Docker or LXC) instead of VMs.