Linux

Debian stable is a very solid choice for a server OS.

It depends on how you're going to host your services though. Are you going to use containers (what kind), VMs, a mix of the two, install directly on the host system (and if so where do you plan to source the packages)?

I've kept my Debian system very basic, installed latest Docker from the official apt repo, and I've installed almost every service in a docker container. Only things installed directly on host are docker, ssh, nfs and avahi.

Debian is a distro of few surprises and stable but slightly out of date packages. Their software repositories are vast and supported across pretty much every architecture you could think of running Linux on.

Meanwhile the world of RHEL has been turned upside down with Redhat essentially putting a paywall around their sources. Although Rocky currently promises to continue being bug for bug compatible with RHEL it remains to be seen if they can continue to do so (in my opinion)

What surprised me with debain, it comes as a very minimal installation, so you will have to set up stuff like sudo yourself.

Use Debian, make your life easier. Chances are the RHEL copies are going to get frozen out, but there will always be Debian, and it's the most community supported server mainline anyway.

I use both (and others) for different reasons. However, the primary homelab server I use is based on Debian - Proxmox OS. It runs on the machine hardware you have but then you can run a few 'fake' computers (virtual machines) on top of that host OS. This is called a hypervisor. So when running Proxmox on the host, you could run a Virtual machine (guest) that is running Rocky and play around with that. Or Fedora, or Gentoo.. or ^A^r^c^h. That really would be the avenue to go to learn about different Distros and nuances without having to breakdown and rebuild everything every time.

My experience is that both Debian and Rocky are stable and very useful for what you need them to do. Debian favors stability, whereas Rocky favors being a RHEL compatible OS. It's easier to do somethings on Debian, but you may learn more enterprise aspects using Rocky.

What would you like to do with your home server?

As others have said, debian is very minimal, so If you would prefer to setup and configure the whole system yourself, debian is a good choice.

Personally, I prefer fedora server. It comes with more things configured out of the box (zram and sysctl configs for example) as well as better security defaults (selinux included with proper policies) and first class support for container infrastructure. Ultimately you could achieve a similar end result with debian, but for my homeservers I prefer to let the fedora team handle most of the system configuration for me.

I was running CentOS then migrated to Rocky. It handles various VMs and containers great and has been trouble free for years. 10 core Haswell-era Xeon with 64 GB RAM and a lot of ZFS storage.

I moved from Arch to Fedora on my desktop/laptop as well. Really helps my mental state not keeping up with the different distro-specific knowledge between hosts.

I run Debian on my server and while it's sometimes annoying how old a lot of packages are, it's ridiculously stable.

My experience with Debian is good.

I'm using Rocky on my main server at the moment, I was/am used to Debian based operating systems beforehand but wanted to learn red hat without dealing with Oracle directly.

It was definitely a step curve getting to understanding the os but I'm quite happy with the stability of Rocky and it does everything I need and more. I think the real question is which would you get more enjoyment out of as far as learning and personally I don't think the learning curve is as steep with Debian.

The best thing I can advise is just back up your data regularly and if you're not vibing or something breaks don't be afraid to change to something different, though as an arch user I'm sure you're used to things breaking.

I have a home lab consisting of 9 mini PCs running Docker Swarm. They're from various manufacturers, Intel, ASRock, Minisforum, etc. I originally tried to use Debian to build out the environment but it couldn't find the network interfaces, or storage, or whatever else. So I made a Rocky 9 install drive and tried that. Every machine came up with all hardware recognized on the first try. So, that's what I've been running for just about two years now. No complaints.

Having used both:

Debian is very easy to manage, it has the one of packages and mostly sane defaults. Ubuntu’s user friendliness owes a lot to Debian. I do not like the state of package management however. Dpkg is in need of some upgrades, and the deb package format has some security concerns.

Rocky, being RHEL-derived is, as expected, exceptionally stable. I personally find DNF to be the superior package manager and I have historically run into fewer issues with it. Repos are extensive, especially with copr and fusion, but not as good as Debian.

For a simple home server use Debian. If you want experience with enterprise Linux use Rocky.

I've been using Alma for a while and been happy with it. Like RHEL types, it's slightly behind on versioning, but that's by design.