sftpgo is a nice project to host files in a secure way without too much hassle.

While I don’t agree with your first point from my experience, the second one is very true. Especially for memory consumption, your typical Java app easily occupies five times as much as something more bare metal.

I haven’t tried not touching it for years to be honest. Longest period without a reboot was something between half a year and a year and it worked without a problem. Check the Arch website, breaking changes or manual interventions are very rare nowadays. There’s just one thing you have to do if you start an update after a long time: make sure to update the keyring first or pacman will exit with an error. That’s also mentioned in the wiki.

I installed Arch on my server because:

• I know it very well.
• The base system is tiny. Fewer packages = fewer problems. Everything else is in Podman containers anyway.
• It’s very flexible. I have a customized encrypted rootfs which needs to be unlocked through SSH, not a very common thing I guess.

I’ve been using Arch for over a decade now. On a laptop, desktop, VPS and now it’s also driving Steam OS on the Deck. I had very little problems with it compared to our Ubuntu setups at work that randomly break on updates. Ubuntu is not as bad as it used to be but from my experience (i.e. the way I use it), Arch has been more stable and reliable.

Imho, the Steam Deck will be the only one with a really long product lifetime. Simply because Valve’s main business is selling games, not consoles. The Deck makes people buy more/different games. Worked on me. I haven’t played much in the last decade because I was too tired to play at my PC after work. Now I can play everywhere. Couch, bed, car, … Basically every other manufacturer makes money exactly once by selling such a console. As soon as their marketing is done with it, they’ll release a new revision and you won’t see a single software update for the old model ever again.