A couple of weeks ago I set up a server this way to help get my fiancee into video games. I already owned a proper Minecraft PC license from way back in the day, and bought Minecraft on Android for ~$5. My thinking is that we could play together, me on a Mac and her on a Galaxy Tab we have with a controller. Attempting to get these two clients to play together is what led me into the same situation you are about to find yourself in.

Something to know is that there are two versions of Minecraft, Java and Bedrock (C++). Some others in this thread have talked about the history of why this is, but the important thing to know is that Java runs on Mac/Windows/Linux, and there are some neat launchers that can run it on Android. Bedrock runs on Consoles/Tablets/Phones/Windows. Note that Bedrock _does not_ run on Linux or Mac.

There are ways to host Bedrock-only servers if you're _sure_ no users will ever be running the Java client, but I would recommend running a Java server with the Geyser and Floodgate plugins for compatibility reasons. The plugins are a translation layer that trick Bedrock clients into thinking they're connecting to a Bedrock server. I've been playing this way (me on Mac/Java, her on Android/Bedrock) for two weeks with no real issues. I haven't explored adding any other plugins to the server.

I'm running this in a container on an old Thinkpad in my office. This setup is common enough that GLM-5.2 set it up in (nearly) one shot.

I also really recommend running an instance of https://bluemap.bluecolored.de/ in another container on the same machine. It hosts a neat map of your world, which your family could pull up on their phones while not playing. My server itself is LAN only, but I used a Cloudflare tunnel to host the map so she can show her friends: https://mcmap.thg3.net/

Let me know if you have any questions or would like my server config!