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🦉@lemmy.mlB
      3·
      3 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.

  • Borgzilla@lemmy.ca
    7·
    3 years ago

    As an old fart, I’m happy to see that Debian is still cool. All of this arch-manjaro-nix-os-awesome-bspwm-i3-xmonad-flatsnap whippersnapper stuff is over my head.

  • Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.ml
    71·
    3 years 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.

    • Kazumara@feddit.de
      1·
      3 years ago

      One of my work colleagues actually uses Nix on Debian to distribute a piece of software. Though it is software made for a hardware appliance so that’s a bit special.

      • phil_m@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 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@lemmy.ml
    4·
    3 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.

  • phil_m@lemmy.ml
    3·
    3 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).

    • eoli3n@lemmy.ml
      1·
      3 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@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 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…

  • fruitywelsh@lemmy.ml
    41·
    3 years ago

    Any issues with CentOS stream for your work? Could always switch to Fedora server too if you wanted to keep the same structures and such, but separate some from RedHat.

    • Auli@lemmy.ca
      2·
      3 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.

  • Arcaneslime@lemmy.ml
    2·
    3 years 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?

  • Maturi0n@feddit.de
    1·
    3 years ago

    On my Desktop, I switched to Manjaro (Arch-based) from Mint a few years ago. Works like a charm and I like the rolling release model. On servers, Ubuntu, Debian or SUSE might be a good choice.