Dear Friends of Ducks and Linux critters,
@helplessduck
#Manjaro is now on two of my computers. So it may be rock solid as @helplessduck mentions. Which is the state of my head. 
Never used Budgie, am using #XFCE.
I appreciate the advice and will follow up your links. As a committed #distro hopper, I have used #Fedora, #Debian, #Ubuntu etc but as a long time #PuppyLinux User, I am used to speed on older hardware.
This morning, I was on two different versions of Puppy. I was able to look at a PDF of how my server was assembled. In the past I would self build myself but glad I did not this time.
Manjaro comes with #Snap. I may end up using LAMP, as Hiawatha has discontinued development
Been looking inside my Server. I likes hardware.
It is all interesting but much more time consuming than I expected.
Manjaro protects me from my own stupidity AND on the whole I use the #GUI installer whenever possible.
I will prevail. Thanks again 
@Lobster
I don't distro-hop as much as I change flavors of Ubuntu. I've used Puppy a time or two. It was too ... I guess bland? It reminded me a lot of Raspberry PiOS, an awesome OS, but not much to look at. I like a pretty GUI. I didn't have to trade much performance at all for aesthetics. Budgie is running on a 2018 ThinkPad T580, 12g RAM, Intel i7-8850 and it's fairly responsive. I don't use this machine enough to worry about it. Only when traveling. Loooook how prettyyyy.