Your YAML is formatted incorrectly. Under volumes you have three spaces to indent the item - mealie-data:/app/data/ and it should be two. Same with all the items under environment.

If you’re going the Docker route and running everything in containers it’s much of a muchness really. Just pick a common distribution that’s well documented, don’t install a desktop environment, and install Portainer as a web ui to manage your Docker environment. I’ve done it on Arch, Debian and Ubuntu.

Do you need a desktop environment on the server itself or will you just log in from another computer via ssh or a web based gui?