I am using UEFI, and GRUB for my bootloader. I did update my post with a bit more information now.
I was not able to select boot order in BIOS because it wasn’t reporting properly, or my drives were “messed up” along the way.
I did not have the option for my Windows drive listed as a bootable option. It did however show a generic entry for my WD Black drive (which is what I installed Arch on) as a bootable entry, but it ended up booting to windows after forcing the machine down because Arch hung at initializing Ramdisk.
I had the afterthought to choose to install os-prober for grub within additional packages.
I haven’t exactly decided on what distro for my server, but I have used forks/offshoots of debian, namely Raspbian or Raspberry Pi OS for my Pis. I understand the hurdles and such that come along with enterprise related products, as I am an IT professional by trade. I haven’t worked with RHEL or Oracle’s offerings yet.
I love Arch, but I too love linux. I never got into Gentoo, but I wanted to try it out just for the experience. I do get annoyed with having to compile everything from source with Arch on my laptop for exactly that reason; lap overheating. I also haven’t used Slackware, Mandrak/Mandriva, Tggdrassil, or SuSE but I have at least heard of them. And I absolutely love the conversation, mind wandering is alright by me!
The tough pill to swallow with linux for me has been the functionality gaps between different offerings, but I love the choices I am given.
Well for my poweredge server I ran Ubuntu on it, and my pis Raspbian. As far as desktop/laptop I use Arch, not for stability though it has been stable for my use case but more so for a bleeding edge up to date experience.
As far as the services I ran, they were for media consumption, and some other network tools.