Possibly linux

They are complaining because of the number of updates and breaking changes. Ansible just a tool for bulk changes

I don’t think you are going to find anything faster. Ollama is pretty much as fast as it gets

How does that help here?

Ansible

So does docker and pretty much everything else. I would be careful if you aren’t doing it manually.

Maybe you could pickup a old workstation and drop a few drives in it. It is fairly affordable and would allow you to get your feet wet. For ZFS you really want lots of ram so make sure you get enough.

How are you going to mount the storage? Do you need some sort of shared authentication? I personally would either use software Nextcloud or Synching or an active directory deployment via Samba.

I love my old desktops that pull almost nothing.

There is a reason people opt for old desktop CPUs and SSD’s

2TB is perfectly fine for a NAS. Not everyone needs high capacity