I wanted to try something different when I reset my self host set up several years ago, and went with openSUSE MicroOS. Ultimately it has led to podman containers running under systemd/quadlet and I'm quite happy with the current set up.
Containers auto update with built in podman tooling, getting at logs and monitoring is through the usual systemd tools. When I need to change something, it's easy to work out where the config files are if I have forgotten and they are easy to read and change. Rootless and daemonless is nice too.
I tried a few things along the way, podman compose felt clunky so I'm glad it is deprecated and it's clear quadlets are the way to go.
There was a learning curve and there's less information out there than with docker, so keep that in mind. I would still lean towards docker and docker compose for local dev to bring a stack of services up and down.
I'm using fedora coreos to run nextcloud on a cheap old workstation. It took some work to get the configuration right, but I'm very impressed by how little maintenance I need to do (so far none at all).
The quadlet + MicroOS (or any other Atomic distro i.e. Fedora CoreOS) is a very powerful combo; I've been on the slow process of migrating all my nodes over to MicroOS and pushing for it or something similar at work. The combo of automatic rollbacks for base OS and declarative container configs+auto-updates feels lock they just slot together.
Containers auto update with built in podman tooling, getting at logs and monitoring is through the usual systemd tools. When I need to change something, it's easy to work out where the config files are if I have forgotten and they are easy to read and change. Rootless and daemonless is nice too.
I tried a few things along the way, podman compose felt clunky so I'm glad it is deprecated and it's clear quadlets are the way to go.
There was a learning curve and there's less information out there than with docker, so keep that in mind. I would still lean towards docker and docker compose for local dev to bring a stack of services up and down.