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.
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.
What will you be doing with your server?
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 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.
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.
I have a (personal use) server with debian for some minecraft servers.
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.
Gentoo for most of my personal machines. I currently have about 12 that I use actively (bare metal + virtual).
(Among other things,) I currently use Ceph across 3 servers for storage; Buildah/Podman/Skopeo, LXD, and Libvirt for virtualization; Git for versioning/a simple way to keep certain things in sync; and Saltstack to automate updates.
I have a dedicated virtual machine for building software packages which shares those built packages (currently via Virtiofs) with a LXD instance that exposes them over HTTP for my other machines to download so software only needs to be built/packaged once.
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.
Surprised there’s not more people saying Nixos.
Its a bit annoying to learn, but once you get the hang of it its impossible to break, and amazing if you have multiple server’s doing similar things
I use Debian on my home server and CentOS on my VPS.
I use FreeBSD 😅
Debian.
Proxmox (which is heavily Debian) if the use case is to host VMs and/or LXC containers. Debian on those.
MicroOS and Debian
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
