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.

  • model_tar_gz@lemmy.world
    0·
    19 days ago

    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.

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    0·
    20 days 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·
    20 days 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
    0·
    20 days 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·
        19 days 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.

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
    0·
    19 days ago

    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?!

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
    0·
    19 days ago

    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…

    • barsquid@lemmy.world
      0·
      19 days ago

      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.

      • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
        0·
        18 days ago

        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

      • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
        0·
        18 days ago

        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.

  • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    18 days ago

    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

  • barsquid@lemmy.world
    0·
    19 days ago

    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.

    • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
      0·
      18 days ago

      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?

      • michael_palmer@lemmy.sdf.org
        0·
        18 days ago

        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.

      • barsquid@lemmy.world
        0·
        18 days ago

        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.