I use Alpine Linux. It’s exceptionally stable, great for pretty much any device and is best for small VPS with limited space/ram. Nice package manager too, but it is limited in packages.
It works great for me since I only use docker containers, but some things outside docker may require something like Debian instead.
Early Beta Minecraft was interesting because it felt like anything was possible. The documentation was not like it is now, so it felt like there was a lot more. That was probably enhanced by me being an imaginative kid at that time. The early generation kept things weird and fun. I miss those days.