Hello there lemmings! Finally I have taken up the courage to buy a low power mini PC to be my first homeserver (Ryzen 5500U, 16GB RAM, 512 SSD, already have 6TB external HDD tho). I have basically no tangible experience with Debian or Fedora-based system, since my daily drivers are Arch-based (although I’m planning to switch my laptop over to Fedora).

What’s your experiences with Debian and Rocky as a homeserver OS?

  • I was running CentOS then migrated to Rocky. It handles various VMs and containers great and has been trouble free for years. 10 core Haswell-era Xeon with 64 GB RAM and a lot of ZFS storage.

    I moved from Arch to Fedora on my desktop/laptop as well. Really helps my mental state not keeping up with the different distro-specific knowledge between hosts.

      • Somewhat but it was more driven on the server-side decision. I wanted something that I could set and forget, that didn’t have a ton of updates but prioritized stability/security patches.

        Of course, speaking of packages I do regularly use rpmfusion and epel for the extra stuff the normal repos don’t have, but I understand why.

        Also being a heavy user of KVM, PCIe and GPU passthrough I found the experience easier and less likely to break between updates. A lot of Red Hat devs work on these subsystems so I assume it’s better QA’d.