I wanted to try something different when I reset my self host set up several years ago, and went with openSUSE MicroOS. Ultimately it has led to podman containers running under systemd/quadlet and I'm quite happy with the current set up.
Containers auto update with built in podman tooling, getting at logs and monitoring is through the usual systemd tools. When I need to change something, it's easy to work out where the config files are if I have forgotten and they are easy to read and change. Rootless and daemonless is nice too.
I tried a few things along the way, podman compose felt clunky so I'm glad it is deprecated and it's clear quadlets are the way to go.
There was a learning curve and there's less information out there than with docker, so keep that in mind. I would still lean towards docker and docker compose for local dev to bring a stack of services up and down.