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.
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.
lots of debian. its debian all the way down.
Debian :)
Give Alpine Linux a shot.
Debian
Debian
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 use Debian myself but I’m considering switching to NixOS.
MicroOS and Debian
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?!
Lol @[email protected]
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
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.
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.
Have you tried Talos?
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Debian, with containers for each app based on Alpine linux.
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
