this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024

84 points (100.0% liked)

Linux

48216 readers

847 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml

nooter692@lemmy.ml

MarcellusDrum@lemmy.ml

cypherpunks@lemmy.ml

cyclohexane@lemmy.ml

d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz

What distro do you use for your servers? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

119 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've only ever used desktop Linux and don't have server admin experience (unless you count hosting Minecraft servers on my personal machine lol). Currently using Artix and Void for my desktop computers as I've grown fond of runit.

I'm going to get a VPS for some personal projects and am at the point of deciding what distro I want to use. While I imagine that systemd is generally the best for servers due to the far more widespread support (therefore it's better for the stability needs of a server), I have a somewhat high threat model compared to most people so I was wondering if maybe I should use something like runit instead which is much smaller and less vulnerable. Security needs are also the reason why I'm leaning away from using something like Debian, because how outdated the packages are would likely leave me open to vulnerabilities. Correct me if I'm misunderstanding any of that though.

Other than that I'm not sure what considerations there are to make for my server distro. Maybe a more mainstream distro would be more likely to have the software in its repos that I need to host my various projects. On the other hand, I don't have any experience with, say, Fedora, and it'd probably be a lot easier for me to stick to something I know.

In terms of what I want to do with the VPS, it'll be more general-purpose and hosting a few different projects. Currently thinking of hosting a Matrix instance, a Mastodon instance, a NextCloud instance, an SMTP server, and a light website, but I'm sure I'll want to stick more miscellaneous stuff on there too.

So what distro do you use for your server hosting? What things should I consider when picking a distro?

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 56 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I love Debian for servers. Super stable. No surprises. It just works. And millions of other people use it as well in case I need to look something up.

And even when I'm lazy and don't update to the latest release oldstable will be supported for years and years.

[–] mdione@en.osm.town 11 points 3 months ago

@bjoern_tantau @communism That 'support for years and years' means security support. So even if the nominal versions stay stable, security fixes are backported. Security scans that only check versions usually give false positives: they think fixes in newer versions are not present when in fact they are.

Many others distros do exactly the same. I only chose Debian because the amount of software already packaged in the distro itself is bigger than any other, barring 3rd party repos.

[–] TheBigBrother@lemmy.world 42 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Debian

[–] ouch@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is the way.

Add unattended-upgrades, and never worry about security updates.

[–] TheBigBrother@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I'm using cron to run daily "sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y" LMAO, what's the way to use unattended-upgrades?

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] selokichtli@lemmy.ml 34 points 3 months ago

Debian. This is the way (for servers).

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 24 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Always, always, always: Debian. It's not even a debate. Ubuntu is a mess for using as a server with their snaps bullshit. Leave that trash on the desktop, it's a mess on a server.

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 24 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I run NixOS. It (or something like it, with a central declarative configuration for basically everything on the system) is imo the ideal server distro.

[–] gomp@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think I can sense your love/hate relationship with nixos from here :) you are not alone

[–] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 3 months ago

Very true haha. NixOS is great and the best I've got right now but I would lie if I said it has never been painful.

Especially for desktop use I want to build my own distro which takes a lot from NixOS, mostly in terms of the central configuration but not much else (I definitely want a more sane package installation situation where you don't need stuff like wrapper scripts which are incredibly awful imo), but also other distros, and also with some unconventional things (such as building it around GNUstep). But who knows if that ever gets off the ground, I have way too many projects with enormous scale...

[–] danielquinn@lemmy.ca 22 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Debian, with a Kubernetes cluster on top running a bunch of Debian & Alpine containers. Never ever Ubuntu.

[–] TDK3D@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Never ever Ubuntu

Why's that?

[–] danielquinn@lemmy.ca 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Because Ubuntu is the worst of both worlds. Its packages are both old and unstable, offering zero benefit over always-up-to-date distros like Arch or the standard Debian.

Especially when you're running a containerised environment, there's just no reason to opt for anything other than a stable, boring base OS while your containers can be as bleeding edge, crazy, or even Ubuntu-based as you like.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 5 points 3 months ago

Probably mostly for their corporate fuckery

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] h0bbl3s@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago

I second this. I run fedora on my desktop and debian on the server. Docker works great on debian as well.

[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 22 points 3 months ago

Always Debian. I'm most comfortable in an environment with apt, and that's even more important on a server

[–] ginza@lemmy.ml 21 points 3 months ago

My server is running headless Debian. I run what I can in a Docker container. My experience has been rock solid.

From what I understand Debian isn't less secure due to the late updates. If anything it's the opposite.

[–] hagarashi8@allthingstech.social 20 points 3 months ago

@communism Debian is an easy pick, but sometimes I can do alpine. Generally, it's all in containers anyway, so doesn't really matters.

[–] savvywolf@pawb.social 19 points 3 months ago

I switched mine to NixOS a while ago. It's got a steep learning curve, but it's really nice having the entire server config exist in a handful of files.

[–] asap@lemmy.world 18 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

uCore spin of Fedora CoreOS:

https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore

SELinux
Supports secure boot
Immutable root partition (can't be tampered with)
Rootless Podman (significantly more secure than Docker)
Everything runs in containers
Smart and secure opinionated defaults
Fedora base is very up-to-date, compared to something like Debian

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] mypasswordis1234@lemmy.world 17 points 3 months ago

Debian

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Debian has been rock solid for me.

It's not insecure. Quite the contrary debian repositories only include packages that has been through extensive testing and had been found secure and stable. And of course it regularly introduce security updates.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 months ago

It’s not insecure.

There's the inconvenient truth: it's easiest to secure an OS, say for enterprise life, the farther you are from the bleeding edge: churn is lower, the targets move dramatically slower, and testing an install set (as a set) is markedly easier. It's why enterprise linux distros are ALL version-branched at a given version, and only port security fixes in: if you need to change a package and start the extensive testing, keep it to security fixes and similarly drastic reasons.

So most ent-like distros aren't insecure; not at all. Security is the goal and the reason they endure wave after yearly wave of people not understanding why they don't surf that bleeding edge. They don't get it.

Enterprise distros also offer a really stable platform to release stuff on; that was a mantra the sales team used for Open that we'd stress in ISV Engineering too, as we dealt with companies and people porting onto Open. But ISVs had their own inexperienced types for whom the idea of a stable platform that guaranteed a long life to their product with guaranteed compatibility wasn't as valuable as "ooh shiny". But that was the indirect benefit: market your Sybase or ProgressDb on the brand new release and once it's working you don't have to care about library rug-pulls or similar surprises for a fucking decade (or half that as you start the next wave onto the next distro release). And 5 years is a much better cadence than 'every week'.

So while it's easy to secure and support something that never moves, that's also not feasible: you have to march forward. So ent distros stay a little back from the bleeding edge, market 'RHL7' or 'OL31' as a stable LTS distro, and try to get people onto it so they have a better time of it.

Just, now devs have to cope with libs and tools that are, on average, 5 years stale. For some, that's not acceptable. And that's always the challenge.

[–] itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 3 months ago

NixOS for my homelab that I like to tinker with, Debian as Docker host for the server people actually rely on

[–] traches@sh.itjust.works 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (11 children)

It’s not conventional wisdom, but I’m happiest with arch.

I’m familiar with it
can install basically any package without difficulty
also love that I never have a gigantic version upgrade to deal with. sure there might be some breaking change out of nowhere, but it’ll show up in my rss feeds and it hits all my computers at the same time so it’s not hard to deal with.
Arch never really surprises me because there’s nothing installed that didn’t choose to put there.
arch wiki

Tempted by nixos but I CBA to learn it.

[–] k4j8@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I agree and use Arch as well, but of course I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. For me, having the same distribution on both server and desktop makes it easier to maintain. I run almost everything using containers on the server and install minimal packages, minimizing my upgrade risk. I haven't had an issue yet, but if I did I have btrfs snapshots and backups to resolve.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (10 replies)

[–] secret300@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 3 months ago

I just use debian cause it's rock solid and most of what I set up are in containers or VM'S anyways

[–] kuneho@lemmy.world 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

I used to use Ubuntu, but nowadays I just go with Debian for servers (as well), but you said you wish to choose something else, so I can't give you any meaningful inputs...

I don't know how real the outdated packages threat, but I would assume, a server never really wants the bleeding edge software and Debian usually gets the critical security updates and patches.

But I'm no expert.

It is true that Bookworm is kinda old now, though.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] robinj1995@feddit.nl 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

CentOS Stream 8. Which I regret. Because they ended support without upgrade path.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] Olap@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago

openSUSE worth a consideration. More frequent releases than debian, but still pretty conservative

[–] bl_r@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 3 months ago

I have tons of experience with enterprise linux, so I tend to use Rocky linux. It’s similar to my Fedora daily driver, which is nice, and very close to the RHEL and Centos systems I used to own.

You are slightly mistaken with your assumption that debian is insecure because of the old packages. Old packages are fine, and not inherently insecure because of its age. I only become concerned about the security implications of a package if it is dual use/LOLBin, known to be vulnerable, or has been out of support for some time. The older packages Debian uses, at least things related to infrastructure and hosting, are the patched LTS release of a project.

My big concerns for picking a distro for hosting services would be reliability, level of support, and familiarity.

A more reliable distro is less likely to crash or break itself. Enterprise linux and Debian come to mind with this regard.

A distro that is well supported will mean quick access to security patches, updates, and more stable updates. It will have good, accurate documentation, and hopefully some good guides. Enterprise linux, Debian and Ubuntu have excellent support. Enterprise linux distros have incredible documentation, and often are similar enough that documentation for a different branch will work fine. Heck, I usually use rhel docs when troubleshooting my fedora install since it is close enough to get me to a point where the application docs will guide me through.

Familiarity is self explanatory. But it is important because you are more likely to accidentally compromise security in an unfamiliar environment, and it’s the driving force behind me sticking with enterprise linux over Nixos or a hardened OpenBSD.

As a fair word of warning, enterprise linux will be pretty different compared to any desktop distro, even fedora. It takes quite a bit of learning, to get comfortable (especially with SELinux), but once you do, things will go smoothly. ~~you can also use a pirated rhel certification guide to learn enterprise linux~~

If anything, you can simply mess around in a local VM and try installing the tools and services needed before taking it to the cloud.

[–] Deckweiss@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I have one server running arch and 3 running debian.

So far they are equally stable after running for about half a year.

Autoupdates are turned on on all of them. Which I am aware is against the arch wiki recommendations, but the server is not critical, easy to migrate and has nightly offsite backups anyway.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 8 points 3 months ago

Debian and Ubuntu server which, barring some differences in versions, are basically the same thing

They're both awesome

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 8 points 3 months ago

Mostly Ubuntu, but sometimes Debian.

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 months ago

Debian!

I've heard good things about Alma Linux.

Also, Ubuntu's not that bad. You'd see this a lot in corporate settings.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 7 points 3 months ago

I mostly use Proxmox these days which runs on Debian be default.

[–] harsh3466@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Ubuntu LTS. Currently on 22.04.

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] ampersandcastles@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 months ago

Proxmox so I can run a bunch of other distros.

[–] Johnny123123@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You don’t wanna use rolling release distros trust me, the whole point of server is automation and less maintenance. I got couple personal servers running, after things i need got setup and all of them running at a decent capacity, i just turn them on and never worry about them. Old package and software doesn’t necessarily mean less security, quite opposite actually, i suggest you take a look at how stable distros distribute their software, such as Debian. For a Debian package becomes stable, it has to go through several stages, experimental, unstable, testing, and finally stable, that’s why their packages are old, and because they are old, they are secure. It might be quite opposite than what you expect.

Mostly i use Debian for my personal servers, some of them are stable and some of them are testing, because of Podman’s new feature Quadlet. Honestly many features of Debian feel really old, like APT’s source list, preferences, and the way to deal with unattended upgrades. It’s kinda hard to get it at first and it’s easy to shoot yourself in the foot, especially many people tend to unintentionally mix and match packages from different suites for new software. But once you get comfortable with it things just work.

As my experience, no matter what distros i use, the worst distros are always those that i don’t understand and in a hurry to put them into production. Just pick one popular server distro and learn the ecosystem, you will find out what distros you like really soon.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 7 points 3 months ago

Debian backports security updates to most software, including popular server software. Stable also always uses an LTS kernel, which stays supported upstream. So long as you’re using latest Debian Stable (Bookworm as of this writing), run apt update often (in fact, ‘’’unattended-upgrades’’’ is probably not the worst idea in this case) and do common sense security practices like a firewall and (brain is not working), you should be good.

In brief, it’s totally fine to use Debian and in fact one of the best options in my opinion.

[–] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I currently use Ubuntu for all my machines (desktops, laptops, and servers), but I used to use Void Linux on my machines for about 6 years, including on a couple of VPSes. Since you are familiar with Void Linux, you could stick with that and just use Docker/Podman for the individual services such as Matrix, Mastodon, etc.

In regards to Debian, while the packages are somewhat frozen, they do get security updates and backports by the Debian security team:

https://www.debian.org/security/

There is even a LTS version of Debian that will continue backporting security updates:

https://www.debian.org/lts/

Good luck!

[–] thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago

I use nixos, due to the incredible state management. You know exactly what versions of packages are on your machine, can build all packages from source yourself or download from a binary cache. 100% reproducible. Steep ass learning curve but tbh it's well worth it. Saves you configuration time and energy in the long run. I've stopped distro hopping the implementation is so good. If you are concerned about security you can definitely harden it. There's a lot more to security then package version. And even then nixos gives you the choice.

[–] Estebiu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 months ago

I've been running arch for like 3 years now. Why arch? Because it just works (and its the only one i have esperience with). Maybe ill try nixos one day.

[–] Wolfram@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I use Alpine Linux. It's exceptionally stable, great for pretty much any device and is best for small VPS with limited space/ram. Nice package manager too, but it is limited in packages.

It works great for me since I only use docker containers, but some things outside docker may require something like Debian instead.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] Codilingus@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Unraid is amazing for getting into servers. It's just the right amount of WebUI and minimalism. Very safe and comfortable defaults, and the ability to start tweaking and adding more.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] user68k@wired.bluemarch.art 4 points 3 months ago

Debian with Docker containers works well for my needs.

[–] GustavoM@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Dietpi.. For no particular/proper reason other than its (extreme) focus on minimalism.

[–] hagarashi8@allthingstech.social 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

@GustavoM @communism I think Alpine is better for a lightweight distro. It's also very minimalist, but without going too bespoke so it's still easy to google a solution.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments