Hi, mostly i use REHL based distros like Centos/Rocky/Oracle for the solutions i develop but it seems its time to leave…
What good server/minimal distro you use ?
Will start to test Debian stable.
You already figured it out. It’s Debian stable.
Honestly, Debian stable has always been my first option. I’ll continue using Arch for my desktops and Debian on servers and stuff.
Same here. Went from CentOS to debian (edit: on servers) when this whole shit show started and never looked back.
Agreed. I like Fedora and there’s some awesome stuff like Podman in it. But Debian or Alpine for cobtraiber images and Debian Stable for servers. I mean, let’s be honest, if your a professional you want boring for a server, and Debian Stable is dreadfully boring; it just works.
As an old fart, I’m happy to see that Debian is still cool. All of this arch-manjaro-nix-os-awesome-bspwm-i3-xmonad-flatsnap whippersnapper stuff is over my head.
Realistically, it doesn’t make sense for folks to be using bleeding edge distros like Arch for a server anyway. LTS of Debian or even Ubuntu are definitely the right answer
Back when I was hyper into Arch I used it for my servers. “Why not make it the same as your development environment?”. Anyways, that immediately stops working when your development environment changes. For a server, just use Debian or Ubuntu.
“flatsnap”. This made my day
I’m all for using Debian and such, and I think out of all the new and hip things people brag about, using Flatpak is the most useful thing for the average user experience and worth checking out. Everything (almost) else is just extra.
As an old fart, Devuan is like debian of yesteryear. Debian without systemd.
@withersailor @Borgzilla There’s also #Elive Retrowave to consider.
You get to choose in the installer which system you want.
If you’re up for it: NixOS!
It’s quite a steep learning curve, but after some time (after you’ve configured your “dream-system”) you don’t want to go back/switch to any different distro.
Specifically servers IMHO are a great use-case for NixOS. It’s usually simpler to configure than a desktop distro, and less of the usual pain points of “dirty” software (like hardcoded dynamic libraries, that exist on most systems (ubuntu as reference) at that path).
I’ve much less fear maintaining my servers with NixOS because of its declarative functional reproducability and “transactional” upgrade system, than previously (where I’ve used Debian mostly).
The thing about NixOS is that while using packages are easy, creating them are still really hard and/or undocumented.
With most popular services already being packaged by people who know what they’re doing this isn’t that big of a deal, but when I want to try out something from Joe Schmoe’s GitHub (or worse, something I made myself) it is much easier for me to throw together a “good enough” Dockerfile and compose.yml together in barely a hour of work than to dig into Nixpkgs internals and wrestle with Nix’s syntax.
Kind of depends what you want to package. For projects that force you to provide dependencies yourself (e.g. most C or C++ projects), Nix packaging is very easy to use. Just slap a flake.nix together with the necessary dependencies, where to get the source from and how to build it.
Where Nix gets really difficult is with packages that reinvent their own packaging system and do dynamic downloads at compile or even runtime. Those really do not harmonize with Nix, as the Nix build process happens in isolation without network access and wants to have all dependencies specified beforehand, with checksum and all.
When it comes to languages with their own package manager it also gets a bit complicated, as while Nix does come with workarounds for all the common cases, there are generally multiple ways to do it, e.g. you can use mach-nix, pypi2nix, buildFHSUserEnv or buildPythonPackage to build Python packages and it’s not always obvious which is the best approach or which will even work.
Packages that softly depend on other packages via some kind of plugin mechanism are also tricky, due to Nix packages all being isolated in their own directories. Again, which workaround works best here can be tricky, some packages require specifying all the plugins at package build time others use environment variables or other means to locate plugins.
All that said, these issues are kind of fundamental when you want to have a proper reproducible packaging system and hard to avoid. I do prefer a system that forces some cleanliness from the ground up instead of adding ever more ugly patchwork on top, but I can understand why that can be at times very frustrating.
I had a really bad experience with NixOS, the idea is great, but I had a lot of troubles at each generation switch. I don’t like it because I had to learn a lot of specific tools, that only applies on that OS, and it was (really.) hard. I prefer a classic distro, maybe Debian (or Freebsd if not linux), with Ansible for declarative config, and ZFS storage to be able to revert a snapshot if I have any kind of problem.
I thought very similar after the RHEL moves that Red Hat has made. I was thinking OpenSUSE or Debian, but I am still unsure as what I am going to do.
Will start to test Debian stable.
This is a smart move.
Debians make for very good servers, I’ve been using Debian servers since moving my desktop from Fedora (when it was still called Fedora Core) to Ubuntu. I don’t regret it one bit. The community is excellent, and there is ample information available online without having to ask a new question.
Have to also add to the voices recommending Debian stable. I’ve used it now for ten straight years after I stopped distro-hopping for my servers and desktop, and I cannot imagine using another distro. It’s incredibly stable, but the best part of Debian is the absolutely expansive repositories that even the Arch User Repository can’t beat. Very rarely do I ever need to use Flatpak (ugh) for packages, or look to add in new external repositories.
@americanwaste @bzImage
Honestly Ive had the inverse experience where the package I need is only in AUR and not debian repos, but at least we can agree that Flatpak and Snap are terribleexpansive repositories
That would be new for me. AFAIK Debian doesn’t have that many packages (compared to AUR or even nixpkgs (see https://repology.org/)). Regarding Flatpak: What packages do you need for a server with Flatpak? Desktop makes sense for me, but I haven’t yet had any use-case/package for server related software in Flatpak.
I switched from Debian to NixOS for servers, 3 years ago, as I think it’s easier to maintain long-term (after being on Debian on servers for years). A new install (after EOL Debian support) often is a little bit more hassle and requires a longer downtime in my experience (apart from the lack of reproducibility and declarativeness and the sheer amount of software packaged and configured in nixpkgs).
I like Debian and Alpine for servers (depending on if I can get away with musl or not)
I use Arch for my actual computers because rolling release is the way to go. Saves me ever having to actually do a full OS upgrade.
You can’t go wrong with Debian
All my servers run debian and it’s going swimmingly. My daily driver runs bookworm with huge success
Bookworm is such a tremendously good release. I’ve been on Debian since Potato, and IMHO we are seeing the absolute best release they ever put out.
“Blue is the absolute color” … why ?
I’m going to throw my support behind this one as well. I’m circling back to Debian after a long stint on Fedora on my primary machine. I’ve been running Debian 12 on my desktop for several weeks now and it’s been pretty great.
it is one version behind fedora in gnome releases, so I installed the latest gnome from the experimental repos and that worked pretty well. I don’t know if I would recommend that for anyone else, but it worked for me.
I have a few personal servers still running CentOS 7, but I will be migrating them to Debian slowly over the next few months. I suspect I will go fine. Debian organization to maintain FOSS ideals over the next 5 to 10 years, so it seems like a good default for me.
I have read about Vanilla OS. It is Debian based with some neat features stacked on top that might be fun for a desktop OS. I can see myself switching to that on the desktop if they deliver on all their promises.
Life long Debian (and Debian derivatives) user (23 years and counting). I have pretty much settled down into (this has been true for years):
- Debian for servers.
- Mint for workstations (that you want to just work and don’t want to spend time troubleshooting / tinkering). Mint is linux your grandma can use (my Boomer real estate broker father has been running Mint laptops for the last 5 years).
- Ubuntu for jr. Engineers who want to learn linux.
- Qubes (with Debian VMs) for workstations that must be secure (I’ve been working recently with several organizations that are prime targets either the CCP or have DFARS / NIST compliance requirements).
My vote is Archlinux. Debian is sometimes a little too “optimisitic” when backporting security fixes and upgrading from oldstable to stable always comes with manual intervention.
Release-based distros tend to be deployed and left to fend on their own for years - when it is finally time to upgrade it is often a large manual migration process depending on the deployed software. A rolling release does not have those issues, you just keep upgrading continuously.
Archlinux performs excellent as a lightweight server distro. Kernel updates do not affect VM hardware the same they do your laptop, so no issues with that. Same for drivers. It just, works.
Bonus: it is extremely easy to build and maintain your own packages, so administration of many instances with customized software is very convenient.
Regarding the kernel upgrades: Using the linux-lts package / kernel get’s you a pretty reliable setup.
I don’t think Arch (or any rolling distro for that matter) is the best solution for a server deployment. If you update rarely, you’re bound to have to do manual interventions to fix the update. If you update too often, you might hit some distro breaking bug and you’re rebooting very often as well. Those two options are not great on something requiring stability.
Once a year there is a manual intervention. Last one was the repo merge, and that did not even break then. Before that… hmmm… I dont even remember.
On Desktop with nvidia and a lot of other AUR stuff it is more work, but the servers run smooth as butter.
You basically recommend to burn money.
Not because of Arch itself and its quality, but because you need to constantly monitor the mailing list for issues and you need to plan a lot more downtimes due to reboot. This is not gonna happen in businesses.
if you need reliable uptime you are in need of redundant servers and at that point you can just apply updates and reboot the servers concurrently
Businesses rely on stable server and applications. Stable in the sense of API/ABI stable. You want an application behave exactly the same on day one and on the last day before eol of the server OS.
Arch is pure chaos and it could completely change how things work and break commercial third party apps on that server on potentially every day. And you would not necessarily notice the error until its to late and your data is corrupted.
You don’t trow money at a your server infrastructure to get redundant servers to finally be able to use Arch somewhat stable. And why should a business not use that redundancy for an LTS distro to get even more stability and safety of operations.
Regardless of the distro, unless you use Kernel live patching (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel_live_patching) you should boot a new Kernel when it is released by your distro with a security warning. Running unpatched old Kernels just for 100% uptime is not safe.
Oh and, I never had issues with Arch changing spontaneously - what event are you speaking of?
RHEL is designed to be the terminator: a bit outdated, but never stopping and never giving up until it’s completely destroyed.
Arch is a house that’s being built by a drunk tradie: everything is probably going fine, but you might end up with a front door that opens up to a solid brick wall.
The main benefit of arch is that it has a huge repo of cutting edge packages. That is pretty much completely useless for both development and infrastructure.
Devs don’t use cutting edge packages because that can introduce a whole lot of work for no benefits. So for example instead of installing node (cutting edge on arch), they use node-14-lts, just like their infra, until it stops getting support or a feature they need comes out in a newer lts version. And if your app is running on lts packages, you most certainly don’t need cutting edge system packages and all of the issues that come with them.
Debian is sometimes a little too “optimisitic” when backporting security fixes
You’re not going to be hacked because of a system package. It’s going to be a bad library, or your own bad code. Either way, it’s got nothing to do with pacman.
Release-based distros tend to be deployed and left to fend on their own for years - when it is finally time to upgrade it is often a large manual migration process depending on the deployed software. A rolling release does not have those issues, you just keep upgrading continuously.
We’re not back in the early 2000s, upgrading the OS is trivial when you’re using tools like terraform, ansible, and docker.
Bonus: it is extremely easy to build and maintain your own packages, so administration of many instances with customized software is very convenient.
Sure you can write a package for pacman and have it available on arch. Or you can write a guix package and have it available on any Linux distro. Or you can write a nix package and then run it on macOS as well. Windows being covered by both of these because of WSL.
I’ve recently had to write a package for both arch and guix, the guix one was a lot easier and the whole process was a lot smoother. Also you get nice features like transformations, allowing you to only modify the existing package instead of having to rewrite it.
Archlinux performs excellent as a lightweight server distro. Kernel updates do not affect VM hardware the same they do your laptop, so no issues with that. Same for drivers. It just, works.
I haven’t used it as a server distro, but it was my main desktop distro for the last ~4 years. It crashed every month or two, and failed to boot at least 3 times even with regular Syu’s. Before that I ran Mint for 2+ years. It never crashed, it never failed to boot. Other machines I wouldn’t update for months. mint had no issues with that and updated perfectly fine. Arch would often crap itself completely, fail to boot, I’d do a btrfs rollback and try again in a week or two. Sometimes that would be enough, other times I had to wait a bit more for shit to settle.
Arch has possible minor benefits, and a lot of possible downsides. It just doesn’t make sense to use it on a server, when you can take a rock solid foundation like Debian, and then build on top of it with nix/guix.
We use Ansible as well, it keeps all servers happily upgraded and all packages in working order - even the weirdest custom software instances. Nodjs is available as lts packages im arch and it, again, just works.
I have zero issues with upgrades on desktop and server except once last year when my old Core2Duo notebook I use in the kitchen did not suspend correctly for a whole week until the Kernel bug was fixed. (I ran linux-lts for a week, it was… smooth sailing).
During that time we had 3 failed migrations of old PHP software to the new Ubuntu LTS and were fighting almightly RHEL because it simply did not provide the packages the customer required - we are now running an Arch container on the RHEL box…
I know this discussion is a little bit like religion, and obviously luck and good circumstances play a role. We both speak from experience and OP can make their own decision.
I have been using Debian for about 20 years now. Server and desktop. But I recently migrated all my server stuff to FreeBSD and I don’t think I will move back. Jails are great and provide me a convenient way to isolate my apps. On the desktop side I will stay with Debian.
My first reaction to learning about jails was “why the hell doesn’t linux have these”.
Linux has this : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-nspawn
I would recommend openSuSe. It is using rpm, but it is an independent distribution.
I think OpenSuSe is really the best alternative. As much as I like Debian, OpenSuSe will be pretty comfy for someone coming from RHEL.
Debian.
For my public-facing server, I use Debian Testing, since I haven’t had any major issues with it’s stability. Auto-upgrades usually work , although there were a few times I had to manually intervene on the latest name-change upgrade from Bookworm to Trixie. I usually don’t even log-in except every few months.
At home, where it will only affect me, and possibly my family dealing with me, if the whole O. S. crashes and has to be rebuilt from backups, I use Arch.
If you need enterprise support I’d look for Ubuntu or maybe SUSE. If you can’t tolerate RHEL closing their source, that is (some people won’t be bothered).
If that’s not needed, then Debian all the way! It’s served me well for like 10 years in my home lab.
