

It works great when you log in as a user like you normally would on a Windows pc. But on a server you want it to run as a service, starting automatically in the background and/or being managed by the failover cluster without requiring a user to log in.
The solution back then was to use netplwiz autologon. Obviously a hack and bad for security, but fine for a homelab. After googling it now, it looks like some other “solutions” are documented in the GitHub issue about this.

I run Debian on my homelab and manage Ubuntu Servers at work. I haven’t seen any practical differences between the two. Sometimes you might get a bit newer version of something from the Ubuntu repositories than from the Debian ones but not even once has that been an issue and most of stuff I use come from 3rd party repositories anyway.