Having had a spicy car battery myself last weekend, due to inexistent voltage regulation, I would have expected that one to be able to vent the excess pressure. Sealed battery out not, it’s better not to build up pressure

Warmplay

Debian and docker. When you’ll have your local server, just go with Proxmox, which is based on Debian. On that you’ll be free to run any Linux flavour as an LXC container. As you are already familiar with it, that’s a no-brainer. The day you decide to play with a raspberry pi, Raspberry-Pi OS is also Debian with very little customisation.