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.

    • qprimed@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      creative is great, but sometimes you really just want your fleet of servers to do their fleet of servers thing. no fuss, no hassle. 100% solid and stable. learn the “debian way” and life is grand.

      debian saved my marraige and raised my kids - ok, not really, but almost.

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    0·
    5 months ago

    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.

  • DoctorNope@lemmy.one
    0·
    5 months ago

    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.

  • Kuadhual@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    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)
      • Kuadhual@lemm.ee
        0·
        5 months ago

        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.

  • RegalPotoo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Debian. When I have time to mess about with server stuff, I want to be doing the thing I want to do rather than fixing whatever broke in the most recent set of updates

    • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
      0·
      5 months ago

      I switched from ubuntu to debian on 2 machines recently and the difference is drastic. No bloat (snap), no asking for pro membership, just works.

  • Fuzzypyro@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Debian is a pretty safe choice overall but and I’m sure I’m going to get downvoted like crazy but arch has been a fantastic server OS for me for a while. Debian is pretty hands off but I have some pretty unorthodox requirements/hardware setups and the combination of the wiki and such a wide range of packages supported has enabled me to use the hardware to its fullest potential. Also rolling release lts kernel is pretty dope.

    • 5714@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      Arch as a server distro is not unheard of, I guess it just requires folks to know what they’re doing.

      • webhead@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Depends on the type of server too. My media server is arch (aur is godsend with all the weird little tools I’m running) but you’d have to be out of your fucking mind to use it for a web server.

        Web server is usually Ubuntu server/Debian with virtualmin.

  • c10l@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Debian.

    Proxmox (which is heavily Debian) if the use case is to host VMs and/or LXC containers. Debian on those.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
      0·
      5 months ago

      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.