Home Server: FreedomBox or Trisquel?

Trisquel, of course. I'd die if I recommended a non-FSDG distro. It works just fine as a server, even powering high-volume things like ftp.gnu.org and lists.gnu.org.

Manual server config it is, then!

I have set up a file server on Trisquel, using samba for local access and sftp server for remove access. I also use borgmatic for backups. I found it relatively easy, but for sftp, it was useful to make my own guide as there are some tricks with directories and permissions to have sftp restricted to special locations.

I also use Freedombox on Olimex Olinuxino Lime 2 (this is on top of Debian) with the /boot file system on the SD card and the rest on an SSD, this machine works fine with only free firmware, I use it as email server, contacts and calendar server, with Quassel server to not miss anything on IRC, ejabberd for communication with xmpp, and syncthing. I use the Freedombox backup function to do backups to a machine running Trisquel, with sftp.

Freedombox is convenient to make the setup of all of this easy for a set of users, which might be independent, but I don't find it very convenient for samba or sftp, but fortunately I can easyily set this up on Trisquel.

On general advice: the machine used as server should be dedicated to this task, it should not be used for anything else, e.g. not as a desktop computer.