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.
MicroOS and Debian
lots of debian. its debian all the way down.
Debian
Debian
Debian is a pretty safe choice overall but and I’m sure I’m going to get downvoted like crazy but arch has been a fantastic server OS for me for a while. Debian is pretty hands off but I have some pretty unorthodox requirements/hardware setups and the combination of the wiki and such a wide range of packages supported has enabled me to use the hardware to its fullest potential. Also rolling release lts kernel is pretty dope.
Arch as a server distro is not unheard of, I guess it just requires folks to know what they’re doing.
Depends on the type of server too. My media server is arch (aur is godsend with all the weird little tools I’m running) but you’d have to be out of your fucking mind to use it for a web server.
Web server is usually Ubuntu server/Debian with virtualmin.
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.
debian and rhel.
if you can do it on debian you can do it on one of the derivatives and same for rhel.
its amazing how many people still don’t know that you can run a handful of rhel machines for free.
Ubuntu LTS.
It has the option for PPAs when the distro doesn’t offer packages or recent package updates but the upstream project does.
It’s a well-established and stable distro.
Debian.
Proxmox (which is heavily Debian) if the use case is to host VMs and/or LXC containers. Debian on those.
I use FreeBSD 😅
I use Debian on my home server and CentOS on my VPS.
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/
In 2001 we examined the packaging format of debian and found it lacked a validation feature available in RPM. This killed debian and all derivatives as an option by the build group of the unix vendor I worked with – please tell me you understand why validation is a pivotal feature for build. The fact the validation carries hard sigs all the way down made the security group happier too. This hasn’t changed.
So I’m running CentOS now, Rocky later, and PCLinuxOS once they get a good packer template.
Zypper on suse has a series of nice patch commands, to check what patches are out with cve numberd and if they are needed or applied to the system already.
I literally once rented a VPS, installed Debian 12, configured automatic updates, installed tor, set the max limit to the VPS limit, enabled the tor relay server.
And now I am unable to login and that thing is just running lol. For the good of the Tor network?!
I am thinking about Fedora IOT or uBlue Core. A lot of stuff needs Docker, even though I think SELinux and secure packages make more sense.
Also keeping an eye on CentOS bootc, which is way more stable but continuously integrated fixes, atomic updates, reversible…
I am enjoying IoT. I got it for headless machines after trying Bazzite. IoT is definitely an easier install on bare metal, they do an ISO for you. I don’t have a setup where CoreOS/ucore make sense just yet, so I cannot speak much to any differences there.
Yeah I dont get coreOS too, tried to install it in a VM.
I mean this ignition might be super cool, but why not have a fallback preconfigured wheel account?
Just changing the password would be so easy and lock out everyone else on that session.
Or just change the password, restart sshd and thats it.
Also a Feature comparison between IoT and coreOS would be very much needed, I have no idea what the difference is, apart from the installation
