I haven't used it, but maybe look at Cockpit? You could install it on your generic Debian server and it would give you a nice gui and tools, while letting you do whatever you are currently using it for.

I am using openmediavault for my NAS, which seems reasonably lightweight and is debian based. If that fits the bill

Why not just run TrueNAS Scale? It's a NAS built on top of Debian?

OpenMediaVault! It has a nice web UI and it's Debian based. However the development cycle doesn't always line up with Debian releases so sometimes it can take a few months to switch major versions.

Well... Do you want it to be a dedicated NAS, or do you want a generic Debian server? Because those are pretty much mutually exclusive.

You probably want to just stick with Debian for running whatever, and then just present storage over smb, nfs, or whatever.

First of all, 4 GB is not so bad, I ran with 4 GB on mine for years. In fact I'm still not using more than 4 GB even though I have more RAM now, it still takes 3.7 GB right now and I run 20 containers.

I don't run Nextcloud though, and I don't run VM's. VM's definitely would need more RAM, and I don't know how much Nextcloud wants. Syncthing wants very little.

Think about why do you want a GUI, they don't typically offer that much if you already know your way around Linux. And once you set up a container it will keep working indefinitely (until you upgrade it anyway, but that's another kettle of fish).

You also don't need anything fancy to put together a RAID1 out of those two disks, if that's what you mean to do.

So you want to put one of those web management front ends on your existing server?

Pretty much any?

Headless distros won't really differ in RAM usage. The only generic OS property that I could relistically see saving significant resources in this regard would be 32bit but that's... eh.

What's more important is how you utilize the limited resources. If you have to resort to containers for everything and run 50 instences of postgres, redis etc. because the distro doesn't ship the software you want to run natively, that won't work.

For NAS purposes and a few web services though, even containers would likely work just fine.

I've been tired with half-ass OSes like from Synology and QNAP that won't do the job, and wanted to explore alternatives. I appreciate your post!

XigmaNAS

https://xigmanas.com/xnaswp/

GhostBSD. It's basically FreeBSD, but easier to use. Works really well on old PCs with low RAM, and it has packages for both NextCloud and SyncThing. And before you ask, yes it uses ZFS by default but it actually works fairly well on 4GB. In fact, you can even run it just fine using 2 gigs of RAM!

If you’d like a WebDAV server, I wrote one called Nephele that has a really small memory footprint. With a 4GB budget, you can run in cluster mode with probably 4 or 5 instances and not affect any of your other services.

If you install the NPM version, you can also authenticate with system users, so you can use it to manage the files in your home directory. (You could also do that with the Docker version, but only for one user.)