Which Distro for File/Apache/DNS home server.
 

I've been running a home built server since Fedora 9 days. But not really getting into it.

All I want to do is, run it as a:

SAMBA server to provide a backup location for my photography files

DNS to provide name service for my internal devices and forwarder for to some of my customer that I am VPN'd to.

Apache server to develop and work with web pages. Including PHP.

NAGIOS to monitor other systems/services. (Requires an SQL backend)

Run it with FakeRaid to mirror the drives.

I've been doing this with Fedora up to FC19. When I went to rebuild my system (on new, bigger drives thankfully) with FC28 I found that it has become extremely difficult to configure and use, as they have effectively disabled the GUI configuration tools. You can't even use a text editor (KWrite) as root and as a user (even a member of wheel) you can't use it on root owned files.

I've read the reasoning behind this and can't argue against it _except_ that using it inside a hardware firewall-ed network for less than critical work.

I find KDE much easier to use than GNome.

I know I could get all but the NAGIOS on a NAS but would like to find a Linux Distro that makes it as simple to setup these services, with gui assistance, as FC19 and before was. Editing config files would be doable if it wasn't for vi and the limits on using editors like KWrite as a non-root user. The gui config tools makes it easier as they effectively build in the manual.

I have heard of WEBMIN but not sure if it will allow me to maintain the above functions with out the gui based restrictions coming back to make it difficult.

Recommendations? Distro? Webmin?

Slackware or Debian. Both are rock-solid stable (they are also my two favorite distros) and, for the usage you describe, stable beats bleeding edge. I would have included CentOS except that it defaults to Gnome (as an aside, I agree with you on Gnome; Gnome spells "simplify" d-u-m-d-d-o-w-n).

You might want to go with Debian because of Synaptic and the richness of the Debian repos. Slackbuilds.org is a marvelous resource, but, based on the contents of your post, I'd be inclined towards Debian in your case.

Slackware includes KDE by default and today's Debian gives you the option of installing KDE (and additional DEs) during the OS install. I've been using KDE on Debian for a couple of years and it works quite nicely.

Just my two cents.

Personally, I'd still recommend CentOS. When you install CentOS with anaconda (the installation program for CentOS/RHEL/etc), no GUI is selected by default, you therefore still have the option at install time to install KDE, instead of GNOME. In which case if you elected to do that, the only thing "GNOME" you would get would be gdm (GNOME display manager), which will do the same thing as KDE's display manager anyway - the bottom line is that you would be using KDE as your "desktop environment" with gdm as it's display manager.

I have KDE installed myself on CentOS 7.5 now and I rarely ever have any issues on CentOS with anything. I've never noticed any major issues per se with KDE using gdm instead of it's own display manager. It's a very solid system.

You should actually try OpenBSD.