For what it’s worth given the age of this thread and disagreement going on in it, I would recommend Unraid.

Easy for a beginner, with enough to take you up to intermediate level: a web GUI for pretty much all the required terminal commands. It’s been around for years, is not going away, but instead getting updated. Works on any hardware and most of all, the community there are very supportive of beginners. There’s also lots of YouTube tutorials.

It ticks all the boxes for easy self hosting. It’s just not for Linux protocol purists.