I use Alpine Linux. It’s exceptionally stable, great for pretty much any device and is best for small VPS with limited space/ram. Nice package manager too, but it is limited in packages.
It works great for me since I only use docker containers, but some things outside docker may require something like Debian instead.
I just started toying with Arkane Linux. It’s fairly easy enough to make your own image and they provide some simple templates you can use if you don’t want Gnome. To me, the greatest thing about Arch is the AUR and unfortunately it doesn’t support AUR packages out of the box. This might not be a problem since you could mostly get along with flatpaks or distrobox. It might be a chore for someone new to Arch to have to compile something straight from the AUR that your device needs to function, like what I’ve had to do.
Kagi is great. Excellent search results for the most part, better than either DDG or Google in my experience.
Privacy, Windows 11, and the fact that my system is more stable running Linux. I could count on a BSOD happening once or twice a week due to a driver issue with Windows 10. I still get strange crashes on Linux, but much less often.
For me, I know it doesn’t offer much privacy if its locally hosted, but the latency compared to using public instances is much better. Which may sound stupid, but at least I also don’t have to depend on another person for their instance.
I have been self-hosting a local Invidious instance for several months. I watch videos from it every day and I’ve had no IP ban so far.
I’ll boldly say that unless you have a multitude of games relying on anticheat, 90% of your game library works out of the box or just needs a little tinkering with Proton.
Alpine Linux would be one of the lightest distributions to make the most of your hardware. I use it myself to host my docker services.
Jesus, even before I read the article it read like the U.S wants to emulate disinformation campaigns others are using. The irony of three letter agencies condemning AI campaigns while the Pentagon is going “We want that”, is insane but its to be expected I guess.