Linux

Are you going to dedicate an entire machine to this?

First, you can run Docker on any distro. Although Debian is great, the version of Docker in the repos is not. So, for Debian, you are going to want to download and install Docker from Docker. Docker is a company.

There is also Podman. This is a competitor to Docker written by Red Hat. It has some technical advantages. I use Podman myself. The command line is basically the same. They host the same containers (OCI images).

If you are going to run a lot of images on a single machine, management can get complicated. many people like Portainer for that.

https://thenewstack.io/an-introduction-to-portainer-a-gui-for-docker-management/

However, if you are going to dedicate a machine, I recommend Proxmox.

Proxmox takes over the hardware. It runs a hypervisor that lets you deploy virtual machines and containers easily. It gives you a great web-based UI to manage everything. Technically, it runs on Debian but you do not even need to know that. It deploys as on OS.

Proxmox actually has nothing to do with Docker. It allows you to deploy virtual machines (eg. Full Linux distributions or even Windows or other operating systems). It also allows you to create containers. However the contained technology is not Docker but actually LXC.

https://linuxcontainers.org/

When you deploy an LXC container in Proxmox, it is like launching a Linux VM. You get a full Linux distro that looks like a virtual machine and that shows up on your network like a full computer. But, it shares the kernel with Proxmox and so is incredibly light and resource efficient.

You can connect to Proxmox via a web browser and see any of your virtual machine or container desktops in your web browser (even if just command line).

Proxmox itself is always online. But you can start and stop individual machines (vm or container) whenever you want.

You really cannot appreciate how powerful all this is until you try it.

So, how does this help you run Docker?

Well, for many things, you may actually find it easier to just use a VM or LXC to install and run whatever it is you want. For many applications, I find it easier to manage a Linux distro than a Docker container.

Or, you create a VM or an LXC and run Docker inside of it. You can even run Portainer. You can run many Docker containers in a single VM. Or, create a new VM or LXC if that makes things easier.

But it is so much easier to manage in Proxmox.

For example, I run a Debian LXC container to run PiHole as an ad blocker on my network. It is super lightweight and I launched it by running a script like they suggest on the PiHole website. And I created a VM (with its own virtual disk for storage) to run Immich (photo management). Even though I run Immich with Docker compose, it is just nicer and easier to manage when it is the only thing running on the “machine” (a QEMU VM in Proxmox) with its own filesystem. I can pull up the Immich machine whenever I want and I am at the command-line where the last command was the the Docker up that I ran months ago). Same story for Jellyfin.

Do you also want a NAS? You can run one under Proxmox. But another thing to consider would be running TrueNAS as a NAS and using its built-in Docker support to run your containers.

https://www.truenas.com/truenas-community-edition/