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)
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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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.
Proxmox. VMs and containers are great, especially when you're learning
lots of debian. its debian all the way down.
Debian
Debian
What will you be doing with your server?
I run Rocky Linux 9 on an HPC environment for the package stability and 10 years of support. I also prefer the Red Hat-esque management ecosystem (ie, Foreman) to the others I’ve tried (but it still leaves a lot to be desired).
I am no fan of Red Hat’s corporate shenanigans though, and if it weren’t for the associated tech debt, I might consider switching to Debian or Ubuntu. I’ve run both at previous jobs, but the support lifecycle has come back to haunt us every time.
If you dont like rh’s shenanigans you wont like canonicals either.
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 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 @Vicen@infosec.exchange
I have a (personal use) server with debian for some minecraft servers.
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.
I didn't know that, thanks!
Debian, with containers for each app based on Alpine linux.
MicroOS and Debian
NixOS. Ubuntu when I just want to test something quickly.
I use FreeBSD 😅
Debian as host and Incus + Alpine for containers
I use Debian on my home server and CentOS on my VPS.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Yeah - and it loads snap on a bare install. Great!
Jokes aside it’s a stable system - I found some signage players on 2016lts the other day, rock steady for 8 years
Debian and Rocky
We're primarily a CentOS (6/7, kill me) and Rocky 8+ shop at work, with Debian handling our webservers. ~~My Boss~~ We 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.