Hi, mostly i use REHL based distros like Centos/Rocky/Oracle for the solutions i develop but it seems its time to leave…
What good server/minimal distro you use ?
Will start to test Debian stable.
Honestly, Debian stable has always been my first option. I’ll continue using Arch for my desktops and Debian on servers and stuff.
Same here. Went from CentOS to debian (edit: on servers) when this whole shit show started and never looked back.
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.
“flatsnap”. This made my day
As an old fart, Devuan is like debian of yesteryear. Debian without systemd.
@withersailor @Borgzilla There’s also #Elive Retrowave to consider.
You get to choose in the installer which system you want.
I’m all for using Debian and such, and I think out of all the new and hip things people brag about, using Flatpak is the most useful thing for the average user experience and worth checking out. Everything (almost) else is just extra.
You already figured it out. It’s Debian stable.
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.
You can’t go wrong with Debian
All my servers run debian and it’s going swimmingly. My daily driver runs bookworm with huge success
Bookworm is such a tremendously good release. I’ve been on Debian since Potato, and IMHO we are seeing the absolute best release they ever put out.
“Blue is the absolute color” … why ?
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).
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.
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.
@americanwaste @bzImage
Honestly Ive had the inverse experience where the package I need is only in AUR and not debian repos, but at least we can agree that Flatpak and Snap are terribleexpansive repositories
That would be new for me. AFAIK Debian doesn’t have that many packages (compared to AUR or even nixpkgs (see https://repology.org/)). Regarding Flatpak: What packages do you need for a server with Flatpak? Desktop makes sense for me, but I haven’t yet had any use-case/package for server related software in Flatpak.
I switched from Debian to NixOS for servers, 3 years ago, as I think it’s easier to maintain long-term (after being on Debian on servers for years). A new install (after EOL Debian support) often is a little bit more hassle and requires a longer downtime in my experience (apart from the lack of reproducibility and declarativeness and the sheer amount of software packaged and configured in nixpkgs).
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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Will start to test Debian stable.
This is a smart move.
Debians make for very good servers, I’ve been using Debian servers since moving my desktop from Fedora (when it was still called Fedora Core) to Ubuntu. I don’t regret it one bit. The community is excellent, and there is ample information available online without having to ask a new question.
I thought very similar after the RHEL moves that Red Hat has made. I was thinking OpenSUSE or Debian, but I am still unsure as what I am going to do.
Debian.
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.
My first reaction to learning about jails was “why the hell doesn’t linux have these”.
Linux has this : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-nspawn
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.
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.
OP wants to get away from RHEL and RHEL-adjacent distros. CentOS Stream and Fedora are still in the same ecosystem and are heavily influenced by Red Hat. People want to believe that Fedora is separate from Red Hat but when Red Hat fires the Fedora program manager, it’s clear that they hold significant power over the direction of the OS and could easily kill it off/change it like they did to CentOS.
They actually own centos though, and from my understanding the Fedora org isn’t ran by RedHat, just sponsored.
I’ve been running Debian stable for years now on everything. My laptop runs it, my home server runs it headless with no GUI installed, my gaming desktop runs it and even my kids run it without issue. If we need a newer version of some desktop app I just get the Flatpak. It’s pretty great and the good thing is that it’s predictable. Once it’s up and running I don’t have to worry about things breaking because of an update.
