What distro do you use for your servers?
What distro do you use for your servers?
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 Security needs are also the reason why I'm leaning away from using something like Debian, because how outdated the packages are would likely leave me open to vulnerabilities.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?
You're viewing a single thread.
Ubuntu server, though I am thinking of using arch even though it is a rolling distro. It doesn't really matter. As long as docker is supported, I am fine using any.
I wouldn't personally use Arch on a server. The rolling release could cause a lot of problems, especially since you lack the ability to seamlessly integrate older versions of packages like with gentoo masking.
Do you have a plan on how you’d do version controlling on Arch? It’d be annoying to upgrade, something breaks, and you can’t easily roll back.
I'll just wait a few days or even weeks before doing any big updates, read the news page of archlinux.org and maybe some forum stuff. Nothing broke so far on my personal laptop, but I also don't tinker alot. All of the data of the containers are also stored in a storagebox from Hetzner so the system breaking wouldn't even mean that much, I'll just restore from a snapshot and everything will be fine.
I also might think of switching to NixOS instead. They say it's hard but pays off well and can be very stable.
Snapper.