Distros

CachyOS

Generally my distro of choice for both servers and desktops is CachyOS. The main reason is good defaults and it runs fast.

Servers

A rolling distro for a server is not too much of an issue for me as I do development on servers and I want up to date packages. I take snapshots, update all packages, and reboot daily (Ansible config).

Efficient resource usage

For a VPS without much RAM and disk, the default zram (compressed swap) and btrfs compression is a great setup. Docker containers mostly doing nothing can sit in compressed swap, and large Docker images take up less of the filesystem.

Desktops

CachyOS has the best performance of any distro I've used, and it just works on all desktops I've tried. The default KDE setup is good and just works.