Any popular distro
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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Mint.
You're already familiar with it, so it will just be the least time invested doing stuff.
If you're trying to squeeze out performance/efficiency, you can load CachyOS and play with it. As an example, it has a scheduler (lavd) specifically designed to minimize idle power use, and another one (tickless) specifically optimized for docker containers/VMs. It has easy access to optimized Java to make modded Minecraft faster. Stuff like that. But ask yourself if you want to spend time messing with that.
I'll add that if you want a more bleeding edge experience, similar to CachyOS, but still within the Debian world, PikaOS is the Debian-based (not Ubuntu-based) analog of CachyOS.
Edit: clarification
Neat! Bookmarking that, thanks.
All the same. There will be no appreciable difference in any of them at the level you're interested that can't be tweaked and tuned from the apps you use.
Edit: though if you want long running game servers, a small minipc that draws a tiny amount of power is a good way to continuously keep the server portion running without wasting a ton of energy. The Intel N100 or the Ryzen 5 (forget which) can both run below 12W, which is about the same as an LED light bulb.
~~I use truenas scale. And then run servers like Plex, ersatz tv, Minecraft, and palworld. ~~
I think I misunderstood. If you're looking to play the disks on a display, truenas won't work for you.
not so much the variant but the tooling you'll use..
ie, ive been usin docker+portainer
my fav setup is kodi, emby, minecraft.. all the arrs' running in containers on mint no problem. i suspect any docker compatible variant would work, but mint is groovy.
Like you've already heard, you're unlikely to feel a difference across most distros. I'll recommend Debian or Ubuntu, I use both