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.
during winter i use gentoo, so the cpu keeps the room cozy
My favorite Server OS is Alpine Linux. Because its small, easy to use.
Ofcourse its not using the standard GLIBC system, but these days you can run almost anything in docker so thats less of a problem.
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.
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?!
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/
Debian as host and Incus + Alpine for containers
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
MicroOS and 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)
When I’m prototyping some model deployment/application/backend, I choose Ubuntu. I’ve also chosen Debian Stable before.
When te decision has been made to actually write the fucking thing for real enterprise deployment, it’s always Alpine Linux so that we have fine control over literally every aspect of the image.
I’d never recommend Alpine for any other use case, tbh.
We’re primarily a CentOS (6/7, kill me) and Rocky 8+ shop at work, with Debian handling our webservers.
My BossWe like Rocky so much, it’s even our base image for all of our containers (ugh).My experience so far is that RHEL (and derivatives) are pretty solid, and not a bad choice. Though, I’d generally want to avoid the complexity that is SELinux in selfhost endeavors.
Debian, with containers for each app based on Alpine linux.
