If you’re willing to forgo the GUI installer requirement, take a look at Void Linux. Pretty slim base installation, very stable and conservative package updates for a rolling release. Excelllent package manager. Downside might be smaller package selection than Debian or Arch.
Yep, been using it as my daily driver for a few years now, aside from trying out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for a few months. I’ve settled on running it with sway as my wm for the time being. I’ve generally been pretty happy with it. I like the package manager and the relative simplicity of the system, which requires a bit more work to set up but seems easier to understand/fix when something goes wrong (usually user error in my experience, lol.) The developers also proved that they could learn from their mistakes with a minimum of drama after the whole kerfluffle with the original creator. Most packages that I need that aren’t in the repo can be had with flatpak. Overall, a relatively pleasant Linux distro experience.
Edit: Forgot to mention, in my experience an actually stable AND rolling release distribution!
Btw, here is a small void linux community for lemmy. It doesn’t appear to be very active, but hopefully that will change with time.
Yep, this is how I do it on my NAS, which is some RockPro64 board attached to WD Red spin drives. I have music, movies, game saves, documents, pics, etc. that equal around 1.5TB and I don’t seem to get excess scanning when “watch files” is turned on.