I probably would have gone with Xfce since this is mostly acting as a server but this was also my first real experiment to see if I could replace a Windows desktop with Linux so I wanted some more functionality in that regard.
Until now the easiest experience for me I actually had was Arch. You have to do everything yourself but i found it way easier to fix things in Arch than in any other distro I used.
Somewhere I read that it didn't have an installer which turned me off for a while, and then I realized that you just need to "archinstall" from the live ISO and I was off and running in minutes.