There are some cool HP thin clients available on eBay for a fraction of the scarce Pi these days, one of them even has an nVme slot so you can put in a real SSD. If I was doing this today I’d use one of those.

Presently my “home server” is only used for home assistant, and it runs on a 2011 MacBook Pro with a bad keyboard, running Debian. It actually runs so well on Linux that the fan doesn’t even spin, at least not audibly.