Linux Server OSes?

I’m sorry we’re not creative, but the best answer is Debian.

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.

during winter i use gentoo, so the cpu keeps the room cozy

Debian :)

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

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.

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)

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.

lots of debian. its debian all the way down.

Proxmox. VMs and containers are great, especially when you're learning

I did this, for flexibility and to tinker without screwing myself.

But then my first install was Debian to run my docker containers sooooo

Debian

Debian.

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

I'd go with basic Debian and Incus over Proxmox. I think Proxmox modifies the kernel but I'm not sure why that is necessary? I've had kinda buggy experiences with some installations and with their UI.

NixOS. Ubuntu when I just want to test something quickly.

NixOS is perfect for server OS. hope in future a little more orchestration tools make it even easier to manage clusters of NixOS instances
- Have you seen NixOps? Curious if that's getting close to what you want or not.
  
  I think I also saw another similar idea a while back but cannot recall the name, might just be a wrong memory.

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/

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.

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?
- 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.
- 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.

I have a (personal use) server with debian for some minecraft servers.

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 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.
Rocky is a solid choice.

What will you be doing with your server?

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.

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...

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.
- 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.
- 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

Debian, with containers for each app based on Alpine linux.

MicroOS and Debian

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!

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

I use Debian on my home server and CentOS on my VPS.

I use FreeBSD 😅

Debian as host and Incus + Alpine for containers

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Have you tried Talos?

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.

For an alternative, when I was looking into server os's, from what I can tell RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) is the go to since it's stable. That said RHEL is not free, so what people use to do is get a free OS which is down stream to RHEL, that's your Alma and Rocky Linux.

However back in 2023 IBM made some changes, and now Alma and Rocky had to rebase off of CentOS Stream which is what RHEL is based off of.

For all intent and purpose I'd recommend using Debain, but Alma and Rocky are alternatives you may want to look into. Personally using Alma and outside of the learning curve of using a RHEL based OS, it has been quite stable.

I run Mint on everything just because I'm too lazy to learn anything else. For my very modest requirements, that works just fine.

I use Debian myself but I'm considering switching to NixOS.

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.

Debian and Rocky