I think that the choice boils down to one of these three: Ubuntu LTS CentOS OpenSUSE Some people swear by Mint or Debian but for most people, there is little

I think that the choice boils down to one of these three: Ubuntu LTS CentOS OpenSUSE Some people swear by Mint or Debian but for most people, there is little to no difference from Ubuntu. Even for servers, using the Ubuntu server install to build a headless server is quick and simple. After that, install something like Docker to install any other services that you require. I happen to run Ubuntu LTS on the desktop with the GUI reverted to Gnome Classic. There is a package to add that option. But I run CentOS on servers most recently. I used to run OpenSUSE and only really switched because I needed to get a more balanced experience with other distros. My last OpenSUSE server was a XEN vm host and OpenSUSE made that much easier to set up than plain XEN on OpenSolaris which is what I had used before. One note about a GUI environment. If you can, leave it off the base server and install it with Docker or KVM or Virtualbox. This may mean that you have to manage two servers in one, and use the CLI a lot, but this is a good learning experience. Modern computers are so fat and fast, that we forget how Linux was in the early days, filling a T1 line using a 486 with 128M of RAM and a 512M hard drive.