Linux

pretty much everything i am or have been using in the last (*checks calendar) 29 years. my debian server setups, frankly by now (despite all the hate) my rock solid manjaro from the last ~8years, my raspbians... hard to pinpoint one particular piece of sw that works better than the others. but what comes to mind now: i have a mostly command line based workflow to create a yearly photo book out of family pictures from that year, using exiv2, imagemagick, and some basic bash stuff. this has been in use for 5 years now, i haven't changed it and it's quicker than any grahical thing that could replace it. ai could probably improve or automate it more but by now I'm so used to it that i cannot be bothered to start with it.

I'm gonna say ErsatzTV. I have had it running for years, and it just... keep going. Sadly the dev got burnt out, and it's no longer maintained. but you should not expose it to the internet. You don't need to expose Ersatz to the internet to make use of it. It's just an admin panel [with no password]. Anyway, it just works. It has a little learning curve to start with, as there's a minimum of four things you need to do to get a channel up and running, but once you know it, it's easy peasy.

Sadly even Linux is a fuss. This is primarily due to full os updates needed every four years plus the changing security landscape. Then there are the hardware issues and replacement every ten years. I guess a partial alternative is a rolling release but then you have the issue of constant change.

LUKS. No need to re-encrypt my drives or do other maintenance. Set it and forget it.

I would say Debian stable is the way to go!

Unfortunately it's not new enough to run grate on my 9950x, 870E motherboard because a lot of things is buggy and not working in optimal!