I’ve seen a lot of different enterprise and personal use distros for servers, but what do you guys use?
I’m planning on using Debian but was wondering if there are any other good free options to consider.
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creative is great, but sometimes you really just want your fleet of servers to do their fleet of servers thing. no fuss, no hassle. 100% solid and stable. learn the “debian way” and life is grand.
debian saved my marraige and raised my kids - ok, not really, but almost.
during winter i use gentoo, so the cpu keeps the room cozy
Debian :)
Give Alpine Linux a shot.
Debian. When I have time to mess about with server stuff, I want to be doing the thing I want to do rather than fixing whatever broke in the most recent set of updates
I switched from ubuntu to debian on 2 machines recently and the difference is drastic. No bloat (snap), no asking for pro membership, just works.
What we use in my office, depends on the type of servers:
- For virtual server (we made a golden template of it) we use Debian 12
- For virtualization host/ganeti cluster we use Debian 11
- For NAS, we use OpenMediaVault (based on Debian)
Why debian 12 over 11 and vice versa?
I would like to default to debian 12 if I have to start fresh.
The Ganeti Cluster was installed on Debian 10 then when 11 launched, I upgraded it. It’s a 10 nodes cluster and I just don’t have time to upgrade it yet. The last update to 11 took me a week to troubleshoot.
Proxmox. VMs and containers are great, especially when you’re learning
I did this, for flexibility and to tinker without screwing myself.
But then my first install was Debian to run my docker containers sooooo
lots of debian. its debian all the way down.
Debian
Debian
Debian
Debian.
Proxmox (which is heavily Debian) if the use case is to host VMs and/or LXC containers. Debian on those.
I’d go with basic Debian and Incus over Proxmox. I think Proxmox modifies the kernel but I’m not sure why that is necessary? I’ve had kinda buggy experiences with some installations and with their UI.
NixOS. Ubuntu when I just want to test something quickly.
NixOS is perfect for server OS. hope in future a little more orchestration tools make it even easier to manage clusters of NixOS instances
Have you seen NixOps? Curious if that’s getting close to what you want or not.
I think I also saw another similar idea a while back but cannot recall the name, might just be a wrong memory.
We use ubuntu at work on about 30 servers. It was a mistake made years ago, I’m hoping to switch them to Debian next year. Ubuntu being a Debian based distro means at least 90% of ansible code will work without changes.
Nice overview of enterprise linuxes (or is that Linii in plural?): https://tuxcare.com/resources/learning/enterprise-linux/
What will you be doing with your server?
Debian is a great choice. I’m on Debian and it is solid.
I do have one I like better: I’m transitioning to Fedora IoT from Debian for my homelab stuff. I like using their atomic desktop distros, I want to understand them better, and it seems like a great combination of recent kernel and system stability.
Interesting I hadn’t heard of these “atomic” distros. There isn’t really much description of what exactly is atomic about them though - all you get is “The whole system is updated in one go”. Can you explain it?
It works similarly to Android and iOS. The system partition is read-only, and each new system update is applied as a new system partition image. All user apps are kept separate from the system and are sandboxed.
I believe the “atomic” action is updating the kernel and all the base packages together such that either the whole thing succeeds or the existing system is unchanged. If the system update is atomic, you cannot be stuck in a partially updated state with new versions of some packages and previous versions of others. Naturally something like that lends itself to making rollbacks easier if it does break, much easier than trying to undo an update on a more traditional distro where they do the update in place.
