A beautiful home server OS for self-hosting with an app store. Buy a pre-built Umbrel Home with umbrelOS, or install on a Raspberry Pi 4, Pi 5, any Ubuntu/Debian system, or a VPS. - getumbrel/umbrel
However, I still use UmbrelOS as compared to all of those, It's the only one which seems to work well with my RPI4 and the connected drive with it, despite my modest Linux knowledge (Fedora and Arch on mobile user), and Umbrel being unsecure and retaining app versions compared to upstream.
Dietpi is a nice option too. Super minimal initial installation and has its own repo of pre-configured software (based on debian) for easy installation of a whole host of applications for selfhosting:
On top of that, if I'm going to recommend something like this to my less techie friends/family as an alternative to big-tech products, I'm not going to pick something that can't be forked and can be purchased by some bigger company and shut down or squeezed for profit the moment it gets popular.
It uses systemd services. My understanding is that it aims to have the applications installed in the most straightforward way possible - avoiding containers where possible.
I saw this OS mentioned earlier and gave their website a gander. It was immediately apparent how important crypto was to their marketing, and that saved me a lot of time looking any further.