What are you trying to do? Debian is pretty solid but you also could go with Rocky Linux or tons of others. Heck, you could even buy a Red hat license if you felt like it for some reason.
Ubuntu and Mint condition that affects your digestive tract and the other day I trust that this was the one I sent her an hour and there was an instant hot to handle this is the best for me.
Host family media through Jellyfin, etc. This would include tv, music, and possibly books as well. Many of these will be managed through the Arr apps.
Degoogle my phone - I’m beginning by replacing Photos with Immich, but hope to also use Home Assistant, backup other phone data such as messages media, shopping lists, etc. I hope to replace Google storage/backup with Proton Drive.
Seems like a solid plan. I used Nextcloud as a Google Drive/Photos/Calander/Lists replacement, but depending on what you are running as your server it may be a bit too heavy.
I’ve heard that once you get into it, Linux distros like Ubuntu are not very user friendly for self-hosting as a beginner.
Not sure who is saying this. Granted, if your not used to *nix, our ways of doing things can be a bit obtuse from time to time but the Ubuntu based distros are some of the most heavily documented distros available with only Arch being better documented (Don’t use Arch unless you’ve got stock in Bayer. /joking, kinda).
Your current OS choice is maybe not what I would choose, but it is fine. Xubuntu just Ubuntu Server with the XFCE desktop installed. A bit heavy for a server install as a result. One thing I will say is that most server software is setup via the command line and setup via configuration files (These are just regular text files readable by any text editor. I like micro, but anything will work). The desktop environment is just extra weight you don’t really need in this application. Doesn’t hurt anything, just heavy and not really needed.
So is it better on the whole for a beginner to have a popular distro with lots if documentation and step by step guides, or to have a purpose-built OS like TrueNAS that might be more straightforward, but with less support?
Stick with what you have. Ubuntu is a very well supported server distro, and the XFCE desktop doesn’t change that. Things like TrueNAS, UnRAID, and whatever is the flavor of the week tend to cover things up to simplify things. This is fine when they work correctly, the problem comes when things inevitably break. You won’t know where to go looking to fix things. Also TrueNAS is a network storage OS, not really suited for what you are trying to do currently, which seems to be hosting services.
It seems to be working well, but I’ve had a few hiccups trying to update it,
What hiccups were you running into? And were you using the GUI tool or apt on the command line?
Call yourself whatever you want, at the end of the day we’re all utopianists who’re overly self-assured that our favorite pet-theory-system will eventually remove all suffering.
“If my vision for society were adopted, the world would be perfect!”
Long answer: They won’t cover anything until you’ve met your deductible. Once you’ve paid out $1,500 (your deductible), they will start covering 50% of the remaining cost.
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