Honest take from the thread: don’t gift a “manageable stack”, gift a service that just works. Two practical routes for a thin client:

Route A — appliance mode (recommended as a gift): Debian + Syncthing (or plain Samba) + Immich if you want photos to be the wow factor. Syncthing is near-zero maintenance: folders sync, partner never logs into anything. Add a nightly restic to an external drive and to BorgBase so the gift survives disk death without anyone touching a terminal. Skip Portainer/Webmin — for a non-tinkerer any admin UI is just another thing to break.

Route B — if you want TrueNAS/CasaOS-style: fine on thin clients with 8GB+ RAM, but check two thin-client gotchas first: (1) many thin clients use eMMC or an M.2 SATA slot, so verify what storage you can actually add before promising a NAS; (2) idle power draw is great (5-15W) but a USB-attached drive on a thin client usually means USB-SATA bridges that drop out under sustained load — get a powered enclosure, not bus-powered.

One caveat on gifting servers generally: whoever set it up ends up being on-call for it. If your partner uses LMDE already, Route A with Syncthing means the “server” is invisible to her — that’s the version that lasts.