Don’t expect much difference between Debian and Ubuntu. I guess you just need to install a newer kernel package from backports.

Can’t talk about AMD but I’m on NVIDIA and I always followed https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers and never had issues others seem to be having. I typically hear good things about AMD GPU support, on Debian and elsewhere so I’m surprised.

Now in practice IMHO GPU support doesn’t matter much for NAS, as you’re probably going headless (no monitor, mouse or keyboard). You probably though do want GPU instruction set support for transcoding but here again can’t advise for this brand of GPU. It should just be relying on e.g. https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Hardware/AMF

Finally I’m a Debian user and I’m quite familiar with setting it up, locally on remotely. I also made ISOs for RPi based on Raspbian so this post made me realize I never (at least I don’t remember) installed Debian headlessly, by that I mean booting on a computer with no OS all the way to getting a working ssh connection established on LAN or WiFi. I relied on Imager for RPi configuration or making my own ISO via a microSD card (using dd) but it made me curious about preseeding wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed so I might tinker with it via QEMU. Advices welcomed.

PS: based on few other comments, consider minidlna over more complex setups. Consider Wireguard over tailscale (or at least headscale for a version relying solely on your infrastructure) with e.g. wg-easy if you want to manage everything without 3rd parties.

NAS

Depends on what your plans are, an actual NAS-only machine or what develops into a general-purpose server. For the NAS part you’d only need a few services like FTP, SMB or whatever you want to run.

Those are easily configured on the command line.

I went for the simplest option

1. Installed a distro (in this case Debian)
2. Installed tailscale on the server, logged in
3. Installed tailscale on my other devices, logged in
4. Used sshfs to mount the desired directory on the server to my client
5. SSH in once a week or so to run updates

Found it very simple. Avoided the tedious setup of samba and samba had weird reliability issues for me when copying large files. Took a bit to learn how ssh works, but very much so worth it.

I’ve got Ubuntu + ZFS, and I’m pretty happy about it. No OMV, no Cockpit, everything is set up through a few ansible roles.

apt install nfs-utils

I personally would run Fedora Server for an easy out-of-the-box experience. It comes with cockpit and SELinux. Great for Podman, too.

Install a better (server oriented) OS??

Using fedora kinoite with disabled sddm and distrobox for all software

Install Fedora Server instead