It sounds like your goal is a headless server for running various services on? If that's the case, I'd stick with a well supported, mainstem LTS distro. Rocky Linux (RHEL9) or Ubuntu Server is where I'd start.

Typical software stack for me is Cockpit (bare metal management), Nginx Proxy Manager, and Portainer CE.

If your system has a decent amount of memory, >32GB, ZFS in a raidz2 configuration for storage. Keep in mind that if you go the ZFS route that it's memory hungry by design.

For backup software, I ended up going with Restic but there are plenty of good solutions out there. Just make sure that you have one.

Hopefully this gives you an idea where to start looking. Ultimately it comes down to a lot of research, realizing there are a lot of valid ways to go about this, and then choosing the one that makes the most sense to you.