I'm seeing very similar speeds on my two-HDD RAID1. The computer has an AMD 8500G CPU but the load from ZFS is minimal. Reading / writing a 50GB /dev/urandom file (larger than the cache) gives me:
We use Alma Linux at work and it's fine, I suppose. I see two main reasons why you'd choose an EL linux distro:
You have (professional) software that officially supports it. RHEL's release model makes it an attractive target for proprietary software and many vendors choose to support it.
You need/want very long support cycles. You can run 10-year-old software even though you probably shouldn't.
Apart from those, it's a competent distro, Red Hat know what they're doing. If you want the equivalent to an Ubuntu LTS / Debian in the Fedora world, it get's the job done. I quite like their approach of keeping the core OS stable while updating drivers, tools, and compilers (e.g., the kernel version number has very little meaning in RHEL).
Is the experience very different from Fedora?
Yes. the age of the core packages is very noticeable. The number of fully supported packages is also very small and you need to go to EPEL very quickly (at which point you're no longer getting enterprise support...). On the plus side, it's much more stable than Fedora in my experience.
Edit: My main recommendation for a stable distro would probably be Debian unless one of the above points applies.
Perhaps my recent NAS/home server build can serve as a bit of an inspiration for you:
AMD Ryzen 8500G (8 cores, much more powerful than your two CPUs, with iGPU)
Standard B650 mainboard, 32 GB RAM
2 x used 10 TB HDDs in a ZFS pool (mainboard has 4x SATA ports)
Debian Bookworm with Docker containers for applications (containers should be more efficient than VMs).
Average power consumption of 19W. Usually cooled passively.
I don't think it's more efficient to separate processing and storage so I'd only go for that if you want to play around with a cluster. I would also avoid SD cards as a root FS, as they tend to die early and catastrophically.
It sounds like Proton VPN (or its repo) is causing issues for you. Given that it's a paid service, you can probably contact their support.
Alternatively, you can also look for the repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d, something like /etc/yum.repos.d/file_name.repo, for Proton VPN. You can then disable it by renaming it to .repo.disabled and try again (sudo dnf upgrade in the terminal). Note: This is not really a permanent solution, as it will disable updates for Proton VPN.
I wanted to recommend using a Docker container but I ran into the same issue with the default config for "drupal:10-apache" (aka "drupal:10.3.7-apache-bookworm"). Opening "node/add/article" results in the OOM error. Downgrading to "drupal:10.3.6-apache-bookworm" resolved the issue. Looks like a Drupal regression to me. Maybe you can also try an older version of Drupal 11?
But in terms of money savings it would rarely make sense, as you need to make it back during the time you run the system. If we assume 6 years lifetime then it would only make sense to pay $120 more. But yes, I'd also go for a system that runs regular Linux :)
I would disagree with idle power not being important for a home server. Most of the time, your system will be doing very little and wait for something to happen. I also don't think a typical server has a display attached. Wolfang explains this quite well: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=94&si=zyjEKNX8yA51uNSf
I'm seeing very similar speeds on my two-HDD RAID1. The computer has an AMD 8500G CPU but the load from ZFS is minimal. Reading / writing a 50GB /dev/urandom file (larger than the cache) gives me:
What's your setup?