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?
Use Debian, make your life easier. Chances are the RHEL copies are going to get frozen out, but there will always be Debian, and it’s the most community supported server mainline anyway.
I use both (and others) for different reasons. However, the primary homelab server I use is based on Debian - Proxmox OS. It runs on the machine hardware you have but then you can run a few ‘fake’ computers (virtual machines) on top of that host OS. This is called a hypervisor. So when running Proxmox on the host, you could run a Virtual machine (guest) that is running Rocky and play around with that. Or Fedora, or Gentoo… or Arch. That really would be the avenue to go to learn about different Distros and nuances without having to breakdown and rebuild everything every time.
My experience is that both Debian and Rocky are stable and very useful for what you need them to do. Debian favors stability, whereas Rocky favors being a RHEL compatible OS. It’s easier to do somethings on Debian, but you may learn more enterprise aspects using Rocky.
What would you like to do with your home server?
Ahh yeah I have forgot to mention that.
- Jellyfin
- Onedrive alternative (probably Nextcloud)
- Personal website + it’s backend, or just the backend
- Pi-hole
- Probably other ideas which seems fun to host
I would do Truenas scale + portainer
Honestly yeah, that’s the more productive option, but I want to learn setting up things by myself.
I use Debian for everything; from games to servers! The best distro, by far!
I’m using Rocky on my main server at the moment, I was/am used to Debian based operating systems beforehand but wanted to learn red hat without dealing with Oracle directly.
It was definitely a step curve getting to understanding the os but I’m quite happy with the stability of Rocky and it does everything I need and more. I think the real question is which would you get more enjoyment out of as far as learning and personally I don’t think the learning curve is as steep with Debian.
The best thing I can advise is just back up your data regularly and if you’re not vibing or something breaks don’t be afraid to change to something different, though as an arch user I’m sure you’re used to things breaking.
Having used both:
Debian is very easy to manage, it has the one of packages and mostly sane defaults. Ubuntu’s user friendliness owes a lot to Debian. I do not like the state of package management however. Dpkg is in need of some upgrades, and the deb package format has some security concerns.
Rocky, being RHEL-derived is, as expected, exceptionally stable. I personally find DNF to be the superior package manager and I have historically run into fewer issues with it. Repos are extensive, especially with copr and fusion, but not as good as Debian.
For a simple home server use Debian. If you want experience with enterprise Linux use Rocky.
I’ve been using Alma for a while and been happy with it. Like RHEL types, it’s slightly behind on versioning, but that’s by design.
I started my Linux journey with a Raspberry Pi and Debian based PiOS four years ago and I haven’t felt the need to mess with that. Since then I have added other machines running other distros, but the Pi running PiOS is always on and always reliable.
