If you are willing to abandon Linux, I would suggest FreeBSD for general purpose servers.

It is a full operating system, which starts you off with a CLI, that is easy to configure. There is a full handbook that describes the full process, and it is on their website. FreeBSD is an operating system, rather than a distribution of cobbled together packages. Due to this, operating system binaries, and package binaries, are separated. This makes configuration on the OS level consistent.

A lot of Linux programs come from the BSD family. FreeBSD also has its own hypervisor, named Bhyve. FreeBSD has its own version of Docker as well, they are called jails. It might take some time to learn, but I promise it will be worth the time.

I am glad that this issue is being addressed. I think it is also worth mentioning, that it is more worth the time to document your code now, than it is to waste time later, trying to figure out what the code does. Many project leads are unwise when it comes to this, and therefore fail to allocate the proper time. This will inevitably lead to unmaintained/unreadable code later down the road. This is bad for many reasons: You cannot reuse the code, you cannot maintain old code, programmers will become angry, ETC…