I live in Ireland, I have family in Brazil that access my server via tailscale. It’s not the best experience, but I think it’s the best I can do with a home hosted server. Exposing stuff to the full internet is a security nightmare.

I just give them access through tailscale, but then again I don’t have many people who need access to what I host.

I wouldn’t do Windows, Linux will give you freedom to use docker for most things that you might want to host. As for which distro use whatever you find nice, there’s not going to be much difference. Some of the things people are suggesting are great for extremely advanced use cases, for just spinning up some services whatever you feel more comfortable would be best.

Things that I need to be internet facing run on an actual server, most of my stuff is hosted on a laptop in my living room and I use tailscale to access it from outside the house, but I mostly consider that a plus and wouldn’t depend on it.