You can't go wrong with Debian
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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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).
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.
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You already figured it out. It’s Debian stable.
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.
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Desktop? Arch. Server? Debian, NixOS.
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.
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If your solutions are work/job related and need to be distributed I think your current options are SUSE or Debian. If your solution is something only you maintain, you could check out NixOS.
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Can't really go wrong with Debian or Ubuntu server LTS
You can definitely go wrong with an Ubuntu server
How? I've run several for years with no issue. They're as stable as a rock
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Go Debian
Debian 12 just released this month too! It has LXD in the repos now, no snap required.
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.
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Debian stable. The mix of having a stable host but being able to pull in flatpak / appimage / docker containers with newer software is awesome.
Debian yes, but don't install from flatpaks or docker. Neither is secure.
AppImage can be secure if the release is signed.
Docker can pull images securely, but it's disabled by default and many developers don't sign their releases, so even if you enable it client-side there's a risk you'll download something malicious.
Flatpak is never secure because it doesn't support signing of releases at all.
Apt is always secure because all packages must be cryptographically signed (by default).
Flatpak is never secure because it doesn't support signing of releases at all
Can you elaborate on this? I ask because I build my own flatpaks, and signing is part of the publishing process.
You should switch to something that's actually secure. Flatpak devs haven't addressed this since 2015, and I doubt they ever will. They don't seem to care about security.
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Any issues with CentOS stream for your work? Could always switch to Fedora server too if you wanted to keep the same structures and such, but separate some from RedHat.
Red Hat has alot of sway with Fedora considering they pulled those codecs out of it. That's when I realized it isn't really a community distro.
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I haven’t been keeping up, what happened?
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/dear-red-hat-are-you-dumb
TL;DR - RedHat is going to wall off all their code/packages behind a paywall meaning the only way to use RedHat is with a paid subscription.
Well that sucks.
Do you know if they will still contribute upstream?
Based on my understanding, Fedora will be unaffected but Rocky & Alma are in some hot water along with Scientific Linux. RHEL is based on Fedora while the others are based on RHEL.
For me Fedora is affected.
I shouldn't be the only fedora user thinking fuck red hat and planning on switching away.
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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.
Slackware. Its stable as a mofo.
I used to be Slackware user. Then I sold my soul to RedHat, then to Debian...
I just installed Slackware after reading your message to see what is new, here are my findings:
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There is still no auto install. I had to manually configure a lot of things using a terminal based fdisk and setup.
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The default package manager, pkgtool, does not have a default way to auto install packages from web (something like yum, apt, up2date). It only installs from your own HDD.
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The other tool for managing packages, slackpkg, was not installed on my system by default.
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The default configuration for X and KDE has problems on my system. I can see the mouse move then nothing.
I can understand why somebody would like to play around with this kind of system as a fun/entertainment/puzzle solving in their free time. On the other hand, if you plan to run some kind of microservices architecture on this, then I wish you best of luck finding a new job once you are fired.
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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.
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.
- Debian for stable.
- Fedora if you want a bit more bleeding edge.
- Arch for desktop/laptops.
At least that's how I've been running my homelab stuff for years now.
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I don't understand what's happening at Red Hat. First they pull the codecs out of Fedora which is supposed to be a community distro so why are company lawyers involved? Now basically closing their source code. I mean technically not violating the GPL cause you only have to have your source available to your customers.
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minimal: alpine
general purpose: debian or CentOS, i'll still use it for now.
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.
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I would definitely give openSUSE a try. such a solid distro. Debian is also great, popOS seems likeable, nixOS is very very solid, I've used Arch, Manjaro and opensuse myself. currently on arch. but I highly recommend openSUSE
Debian is stable. Arch is bleeding edge and vanilla. if you want something on arch you got to install it and follow the arch wiki
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