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.

    •  Cal🦉   ( @Cal@lemmy.ml ) B
      5•2 years ago

      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.

      •  The Bard in Green   ( @thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz ) 
        9•2 years ago

        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).
  •  voluntaryexilecat   ( @voluntaryexilecat@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
    20•2 years ago

    My vote is Archlinux. Debian is sometimes a little too “optimisitic” when backporting security fixes and upgrading from oldstable to stable always comes with manual intervention.

    Release-based distros tend to be deployed and left to fend on their own for years - when it is finally time to upgrade it is often a large manual migration process depending on the deployed software. A rolling release does not have those issues, you just keep upgrading continuously.

    Archlinux performs excellent as a lightweight server distro. Kernel updates do not affect VM hardware the same they do your laptop, so no issues with that. Same for drivers. It just, works.

    Bonus: it is extremely easy to build and maintain your own packages, so administration of many instances with customized software is very convenient.

    •  Sw00$h   ( @Scytale@feddit.de ) 
      2•2 years ago

      You basically recommend to burn money.

      Not because of Arch itself and its quality, but because you need to constantly monitor the mailing list for issues and you need to plan a lot more downtimes due to reboot. This is not gonna happen in businesses.

        •  Sw00$h   ( @Scytale@feddit.de ) 
          1•2 years ago

          Businesses rely on stable server and applications. Stable in the sense of API/ABI stable. You want an application behave exactly the same on day one and on the last day before eol of the server OS.

          Arch is pure chaos and it could completely change how things work and break commercial third party apps on that server on potentially every day. And you would not necessarily notice the error until its to late and your data is corrupted.

          You don’t trow money at a your server infrastructure to get redundant servers to finally be able to use Arch somewhat stable. And why should a business not use that redundancy for an LTS distro to get even more stability and safety of operations.

    •  Shareni   ( @Shareni@programming.dev ) 
      0•2 years ago

      RHEL is designed to be the terminator: a bit outdated, but never stopping and never giving up until it’s completely destroyed.

      Arch is a house that’s being built by a drunk tradie: everything is probably going fine, but you might end up with a front door that opens up to a solid brick wall.

      The main benefit of arch is that it has a huge repo of cutting edge packages. That is pretty much completely useless for both development and infrastructure.

      Devs don’t use cutting edge packages because that can introduce a whole lot of work for no benefits. So for example instead of installing node (cutting edge on arch), they use node-14-lts, just like their infra, until it stops getting support or a feature they need comes out in a newer lts version. And if your app is running on lts packages, you most certainly don’t need cutting edge system packages and all of the issues that come with them.

      Debian is sometimes a little too “optimisitic” when backporting security fixes

      You’re not going to be hacked because of a system package. It’s going to be a bad library, or your own bad code. Either way, it’s got nothing to do with pacman.

      Release-based distros tend to be deployed and left to fend on their own for years - when it is finally time to upgrade it is often a large manual migration process depending on the deployed software. A rolling release does not have those issues, you just keep upgrading continuously.

      We’re not back in the early 2000s, upgrading the OS is trivial when you’re using tools like terraform, ansible, and docker.

      Bonus: it is extremely easy to build and maintain your own packages, so administration of many instances with customized software is very convenient.

      Sure you can write a package for pacman and have it available on arch. Or you can write a guix package and have it available on any Linux distro. Or you can write a nix package and then run it on macOS as well. Windows being covered by both of these because of WSL.

      I’ve recently had to write a package for both arch and guix, the guix one was a lot easier and the whole process was a lot smoother. Also you get nice features like transformations, allowing you to only modify the existing package instead of having to rewrite it.

      Archlinux performs excellent as a lightweight server distro. Kernel updates do not affect VM hardware the same they do your laptop, so no issues with that. Same for drivers. It just, works.

      I haven’t used it as a server distro, but it was my main desktop distro for the last ~4 years. It crashed every month or two, and failed to boot at least 3 times even with regular Syu’s. Before that I ran Mint for 2+ years. It never crashed, it never failed to boot. Other machines I wouldn’t update for months. mint had no issues with that and updated perfectly fine. Arch would often crap itself completely, fail to boot, I’d do a btrfs rollback and try again in a week or two. Sometimes that would be enough, other times I had to wait a bit more for shit to settle.

      Arch has possible minor benefits, and a lot of possible downsides. It just doesn’t make sense to use it on a server, when you can take a rock solid foundation like Debian, and then build on top of it with nix/guix.

      •  voluntaryexilecat   ( @voluntaryexilecat@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
        1•2 years ago

        We use Ansible as well, it keeps all servers happily upgraded and all packages in working order - even the weirdest custom software instances. Nodjs is available as lts packages im arch and it, again, just works.

        I have zero issues with upgrades on desktop and server except once last year when my old Core2Duo notebook I use in the kitchen did not suspend correctly for a whole week until the Kernel bug was fixed. (I ran linux-lts for a week, it was… smooth sailing).

        During that time we had 3 failed migrations of old PHP software to the new Ubuntu LTS and were fighting almightly RHEL because it simply did not provide the packages the customer required - we are now running an Arch container on the RHEL box…

        I know this discussion is a little bit like religion, and obviously luck and good circumstances play a role. We both speak from experience and OP can make their own decision.

  •  phil_m   ( @phil_m@lemmy.ml ) 
    17•2 years ago

    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).

    •  ShittyKopper [they/them]   ( @ShittyKopper@lemmy.w.on-t.work ) English
      5•2 years ago

      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.

      •  phil_m   ( @phil_m@lemmy.ml ) English
        2•2 years ago

        Well I guess it depends how deep you’re in the rabbit hole already, I think it’s relatively easy for me at this point to create a new package (I’m maintainer already for quite a few). But yeah … steep learning curve … Less so with Nix itself, though non-the-less, it’s a simple functional programming language with a new paradigm (derivations). But rather NixOS/nixpkgs Nix magic. For example there’s a dynamic dependently typed type-system built on top of untyped Nix in the NixOS module system that is spin up on evaluation time.

        But I understand your point, at the beginning of my NixOS journey I have also rather created a “good enough” Dockerfile. Depending on the exact context I still do this nowadays (often because there’s an official well maintained docker image in comparison to a not so well maintained Nix one, and the context is too complex to maintain/develop/extend it myself). But if there’s a good solution in Nix I rather use that, and that is often less headache than setting up a service with e.g. docker-compose. I also use flakes mostly for a dev environment, if you’re a little bit deeper in it, you can spin up a relatively clean dev env in short time (I’m often copy pasting the ones I have written from different projects, and change the packages/dependencies).

    •  eoli3n   ( @eoli3n@lemmy.ml ) 
      2•2 years ago

      I had a really bad experience with NixOS, the idea is great, but I had a lot of troubles at each generation switch. I don’t like it because I had to learn a lot of specific tools, that only applies on that OS, and it was (really.) hard. I prefer a classic distro, maybe Debian (or Freebsd if not linux), with Ansible for declarative config, and ZFS storage to be able to revert a snapshot if I have any kind of problem.

      •  phil_m   ( @phil_m@lemmy.ml ) 
        1•2 years ago

        As I said it has a steep learning curve and documentation is pretty much the nixpkgs repo itself (well after understanding the basics of Nix and NixOS at least, with the combination of the https://nixos.wiki mostly IMO). It also takes some time to get used to the quirks of NixOS (and understanding the necessary practical design decisions of these quirks).

        But I have nowadays seldom trouble with switching the generations (i.e. nixos-rebuild switch), unless you’re updating flake inputs or (legacy) channels (where e.g. a new kernel might be used). In that case it makes sense to reboot into the new configuration. Also, obviously that can lead to short down-times (including just restarting a systemd service, if a service has changed in between the generations), if that is unacceptable, there obviously needs to be a more sophisticated solution, like kubernetes via e.g. kubnix. I’m not sure how much of that can be achieved with Ansible, as I haven’t used it that much because I disliked the “programming” capabilities of the Ansible yaml syntax (which feels kinda hacky IMHO).

        But apart from NixOS, one can also just use Nix on a different system to e.g. deploy or create docker images (which can be really compact, as only the necessary dependencies for a package is packaged) that in turn could e.g. be managed with Ansible or something…

      •  phil_m   ( @phil_m@lemmy.ml ) 
        2•2 years ago

        Honestly, unless you’re using Nix within something like docker images (Nix has great support for writing really minimal docker images) or use it to just build software (which is also a great use-case), I would rather go straight to NixOS, in my experience it’s a smoother experience than using Nix on a different distro and e.g. services (like standalone home-manager) .

  •  slabber   ( @sundaylab@lemmy.ml ) 
    8•2 years ago

    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.

    •  itchy_lizard   ( @itchy_lizard@feddit.it ) English
      6•2 years ago

      Debian yes, but don’t install from flatpaks or docker. Neither is secure.

      AppImage can be secure if the release is signed.

      Docker can pull images securely, but it’s disabled by default and many developers don’t sign their releases, so even if you enable it client-side there’s a risk you’ll download something malicious.

      Flatpak is never secure because it doesn’t support signing of releases at all.

      Apt is always secure because all packages must be cryptographically signed (by default).

      •  ono   ( @ono@lemmy.ca ) English
        7•2 years ago

        Flatpak is never secure because it doesn’t support signing of releases at all

        Can you elaborate on this? I ask because I build my own flatpaks, and signing is part of the publishing process.

          •  ono   ( @ono@lemmy.ca ) English
            3•2 years ago

            Your earlier comment complains about pulling images securely, presumably meaning signature verification, which I believe Flatpak does.

            The report you linked is about tying downloaded sources to their author using public key infrastructure, which is a different issue. APT and dpkg don’t do that, either. (I know this because I build and publish with those, too.)

            Can you name a packaging system that does? I can’t. I would like to see it (along with reproducible builds) integrated into the software ecosystem, and I think we’re moving in that direction, but it will take time to become common.

            I have my own criticisms of Flatpak, mostly regarding the backwards permissions model (packages grant themselves permissions by default) and sloppy sandboxing policies on Flathub, so I caution against blindly assuming it’s safe. But claiming that it doesn’t support signing of releases is just plain false.

            •  federico3   ( @federico3@lemmy.ml ) English
              1•2 years ago

              This is not correct. APT always verifies cryptographic signature unless you explicitly disable it. Yet it’s very important to understand who is signing packages. What kind of review process did the software go through? What kind of vetting did the package maintainer themselves go through?

              If software is signed only by the upstream developer and no 3rd party review is done by a distribution this means trusting a stranger’s account on a software forge.

              Update: the Debian infrastructure supports checking gpg signatures from upstream developers i.e. on the tarballs published on software forges.

              •  ono   ( @ono@lemmy.ca ) English
                2•2 years ago

                This is not correct. APT always verifies cryptographic signature unless you explicitly disable it.

                You’ve misunderstood what I wrote.

            •  itchy_lizard   ( @itchy_lizard@feddit.it ) English
              1•2 years ago

              I believe Flatpak does.

              Flatpak does not authenticate files that it downloads. Please stop spreading misinformation that flatpak is secure. It’s not.

              If the flatpak (flathub?) repo was compromised and started serving malicious packages, the client would happily download & install them because it doesn’t have any cryptographic authenticity checks.

              APT and dpkg don’t do that

              Apt does verify the authenticity of everything it downloads (by default) using PGP signatures on SHA256SUMS manifest files. This provides cryptographic authenticity of everything it downloads. Flatpak doesn’t do this.

              Again, this is clearly documented here https://wiki.debian.org/SecureApt

              •  ono   ( @ono@lemmy.ca ) English
                4•2 years ago

                Again, you’re confusing two different things (sources vs. packages). I’m not going to argue with you, though. Good day.

                •  itchy_lizard   ( @itchy_lizard@feddit.it ) English
                  3•2 years ago

                  I’m talking about the end-user securely downloading packages from the repo, not how the package maintainer obtains the software upstream.

                  How a package maintainer obtains the software from the source is dynamic and depends on the package. Ideally those releases are signed by the developer. In any case, if the package is poisoned when grabbing the source, it’s much easier for the community to detect than a targeted MITM attack on a client obtaining it from the repo.

                  I can say that I do maintain a software project that’s in the repo, and we do sign it with our PGP release key. Our Debian package maintainer does verify its authenticity by checking the release’s signature. So the authenticity is checked both at the source and when downloading the package.

    •  RangerHere   ( @RangerHere@programming.dev ) 
      14•2 years ago

      I used to be Slackware user. Then I sold my soul to RedHat, then to Debian…

      I just installed Slackware after reading your message to see what is new, here are my findings:

      • There is still no auto install. I had to manually configure a lot of things using a terminal based fdisk and setup.

      • The default package manager, pkgtool, does not have a default way to auto install packages from web (something like yum, apt, up2date). It only installs from your own HDD.

      • The other tool for managing packages, slackpkg, was not installed on my system by default.

      • The default configuration for X and KDE has problems on my system. I can see the mouse move then nothing.

      I can understand why somebody would like to play around with this kind of system as a fun/entertainment/puzzle solving in their free time. On the other hand, if you plan to run some kind of microservices architecture on this, then I wish you best of luck finding a new job once you are fired.

    •  Auli   ( @Auli@lemmy.ca ) 
      4•2 years ago

      Red Hat has alot of sway with Fedora considering they pulled those codecs out of it. That’s when I realized it isn’t really a community distro.

      •  knowncarbage   ( @knowncarbage@lemmy.fmhy.ml ) 
        3•2 years ago

        It think it’s more for RH/IBM to test new stuff on the community as opposed to something like Debian or Gentoo that actually has a fairly clear community commitment.

        I don’t recall a lot community polling and discussion when they moved to systemd, btrfs or wayland.

            •  Cal🦉   ( @Cal@lemmy.ml ) B
              3•2 years ago

              I completely understand your perspective. I also made the decision to migrate from Fedora, a move that was echoed by several of my colleagues. This shift wasn’t widely reported in the usual tech podcasts and media outlets I follow, which surprised me, considering my coworkers had already made the switch. It might be a coincidence, but I can’t help but wonder if there’s an under-the-radar trend taking place.

              Recent experiences with corporate mergers and acquisitions have left me cautious, so when I heard about Red Hat’s decision to part ways with long-standing Fedora contributors, I began contemplating alternatives. Given IBM’s involvement, I had a gut feeling that the situation might deteriorate over time. I didn’t realize Red Hat had some of these FOSS issues well before the buy out.

              I decided to test a transition to Debian 12. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and I must say, if things continue on this positive trajectory, I see myself sticking with it for the long haul. I’ve always appreciated Fedora’s blend of stability and cutting-edge features. Debian 12, on the other hand, has proven to be incredibly reliable. Despite my risky decision to install the latest experimental GNOME packages, it has held up well and is up-to-date - though I understand Debian’s release schedule might not provide the same consistent flow of new packages that Fedora does. That said, I’m comfortable with a setup that prioritizes stability and adherence to free and open-source software principles.

            •  Asyx   ( @Asyx@lemmy.ml ) 
              2•2 years ago

              What are you going to switch to (for desktop). I might go Arch but I always liked the more traditional feeling of Fedora and fixed releases but then also having recent versions in the repositories. I do miss the aur sometimes though.

      •  squidzorz   ( @squidzorz@lemmy.ml ) English
        3•2 years ago

        Does it require a paid subscription? You can have a free developer account. I didn’t see anything in the Red Hat post besides it being available through the customer portal, which you have access to with a free account.