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.

      • cloudless@lemmy.mlEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Turtle@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          I’ve used debian on and off since the late 90s, what stands out about bookworm? They’ve been mostly the same to me, not that that’s a bad thing.

    • Cal🦉@lemmy.mlB
      3·
      1 year 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.

      • KindaABigDyl@programming.dev
        32·
        1 year ago

        Eh. I mean it’s certainly a smaller curve than other “hard” distros like Arch or Gentoo, and there really isn’t one at all since the installer does most of the complicated stuff for you.

        Would I recommend it to beginners? Probably not as they wouldn’t be willing to do any reading, configuring, or time sinking at all.

        However, for this use case of building solutions by an experienced Linux user, the 30 min to an hour of learning is really not a lot when it would save a ton of time down the line. It’s not like you need to be a nix lang or nixos expert to use it effectively

        • mangopuncher@lemmy.ml
          2·
          1 year ago

          I mostly agree with this, I have it on my laptop. Took an hour or two to learn it, used a live image from the website just like any distro. Not for beginners, but someone that is used to arch, after you rtfm it’s fine.

        • huiledolive@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I see more and more people mentionning NixOS, until I read your message I thought it’d be more complicated than that to use it. But I have a beginner question: do the Nix repositories contain many packages that you’d want, or do you find yourself installing stuff manually?

          • KindaABigDyl@programming.devEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            That’s actually one of its selling points. 80k packages. It’s more than the AUR (or any other package manager, for that matter).

            I’ve only had 3 programs not be available so far: a tool someone made for RGB set up on MSI laptops (somewhat niche tool) and Slippi & Project+ which were only available as AppImages that for some reason wouldn’t run and need their own environment.

            Very rarely will something not be available, and even then, someone has probably already figured out how to install it; it’s just not in the main repo, so a quick internet search will remedy it without you having to do any thinking yourself.

  • dotancohen@lemmy.world
    7·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • slabber@lemmy.ml
    6·
    1 year 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.

  • phil_m@lemmy.ml
    6·
    1 year 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).

    • eoli3n@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 year 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@lemmy.ml
        1·
        1 year 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…

  • Mortalsub@lemmy.world
    6·
    1 year ago

    Debian 12, Opensuse leap or tumbleweed, SLES, Fedora, Linux mint / LMDE, Freebsd, Alma Linux OS

  • Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.ml
    71·
    1 year ago

    If your solutions are work/job related and need to be distributed I think your current options are SUSE or Debian. If your solution is something only you maintain, you could check out NixOS.

  • Arcaneslime@lemmy.ml
    5·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been seeing stuff about this but I don’t quite understand, what does this mean for Fedora? Do I need to switch too?

    • Whooping_Seal@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      1 year ago

      To elaborate further on what Vani said below, Fedora is an independent community run project but Red Hat does provide some funding to the project. Fedora is also “upstream” of RHEL / CentOS so it is not impacted like Alma / Rocky.

    • Vani@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      Those distos are for professional use cases mostly. Fedora is fine and there is no need to worry.

  • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
    83·
    1 year ago

    Debian

    Debian 12 Bookworm is their best release ever, and I am seeing a lot of positive opinions about it suddenly. It may be a Ubuntu 16.04 moment.

    • pproe@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Bookworm was the final straw that made me switch to Debian (and linux in general full time). Such a polished OS. And if the release cycle doesn’t suit your workflow its a very smooth change over to one of the many debian-based distros.

      • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.mlEnglish
        13·
        1 year ago

        I am on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (since 16.04), and I will absolutely try it. The non free firmware support seems like Debian has become more open minded and pragmatic, and I like that. Ubuntu is safe, but I have become comfortable enough with Linux to step up my game with a more solid distro.

          • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
            14·
            1 year ago

            Have you bothered to research the consensus and what Debian’s new release has? Literally 2 minutes away if you search internet instead of replying. Do not expect spoonfeeding.

    • jsonborne@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      Does Debian let you specify regulatory compliance at install time? Or is it a do it yourself manually situation where you write an Ansible playbook.