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.
Debian :)
Give Alpine Linux a shot.
I’m sorry we’re not creative, but the best answer is Debian.
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. 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.
lots of debian. its debian all the way down.
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
Debian
Debian
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.
Debian
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.
Debian.
Proxmox (which is heavily Debian) if the use case is to host VMs and/or LXC containers. Debian on those.
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/
I have a (personal use) server with debian for some minecraft servers.
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
