Popup ads? Where are they? That’s not something I’ve heard of, but then I always use an adblocker…

I used it for years on a raspberry pi, and it was great, very easy to manage storages and different ways of sharing over a network.

If you are after a Debian based system, with an interface for file server/backups/network storage, with a (web) interface, you are pretty much describing https://www.openmediavault.org/ . Decent plugin ecosystem to set up Wireguard, as well as a web interface to set up docker based containers for anything.