I came back to Gentoo after years of Kubuntu. Once they forced snap down our throats and started pulling other weird crap I knew it was time to make a change. I came back to Gentoo and it's been pretty great. Still a few things to iron out on my laptop installs, but it's great for my home server.

I was thinking FireChrome

I've been doing Linux server administration for 20 years now. You'll always have to duckduckgo things. You'll never keep it all in your head, even just a single server with a handful of services. Docker and containers really isn't too hard. Just start small and build from there. If you can learn how the chroot command works, you've pretty much learned docker. It's just chroot with more features.

Yacy is pretty great.

This is a confirmation bias thing, not a political thing. If you are in charge of a discussion forum you will always push it to support your confirmation bias. This is why the first amendment is so important. If the government is in charge of public discourse, the people in charge (either side) will work extra hard to ensure their opposing ideas are simply dismissed as without merit.

Finally getting the strl family functions. It really shouldn't have taken this long given how many problems are caused by strcat (or even strncat). Now getting people to use them is the next battle.

I would honestly recommend buying an old laptop with a broken screen (or an old netbook or something, make sure it has an Ethernet port), a decent DSL modem, a USB network adapter, and a switch if you need it. Now you've got everything you need to make a super capable router. Install a very basic Linux distribution and get NAT setup (it's like 4 or 5 commands), configure the firewall, and your VPN software of choice. I've run a setup like this for years and it's great, because any time a component is "out-of-date" you just update that component. For example, you need AX WiFi instead of AC, just upgrade the WiFi adapter).