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.
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.
You can’t go wrong with Debian
If you want easy way - Ubuntu. All packages exist, all developers support. But snap is pain.
If you need mainline packages - Arch. But be care with bugs. Use LTS kernel or you can broke filesystem on one day for example.
If you want forgot about dependencies - NixOS. But Nix not classic packet manager and you can feel pain on start.
In reality, a lot depends on the environment in which your code will work. If it’s Java, then in principle it doesn’t matter, but if it’s C/C++, it’s better to develop in an environment as close to production as possible.
This question is just going to draw a lot of “hey what’s your favourite distro” responses.
But if you want something EL-like that isn’t RHEL, consider the bastard child of Conectiva and Mandrake, long ejected from the RedHat family but still very similar – PCLinuxOS. It has the superior signed packaging format, and it has much of the same workflow. Its packer compatibility suffers greatly from its mageia times - I think - so they’re still a bit ghetto about anything at scale, but that’s almost the only thing they don’t have nailed-down. Their massive compatibility window delivers on everything AppStream claims but cannot.
For minimal stuff, consider AlpineLinux, which also is free of Systemd and still manages to run really well for reasons Lennart’s fans simply can’t understand.
I’m a long time Opensuse user
but that is also somewhat RedHat based I think. Highly recommend it, though. Have been using it on a server since 2014 and just kept updating through all the opensuse versions since then without problems. Exceptionally stable.Also use it on my work laptop and I’m also with that very satisfied regarding stability and usability.
Edit: it’s based on Slackware and not redhat.
Debian.
If you are willing to abandon Linux, I would suggest FreeBSD for general purpose servers.
It is a full operating system, which starts you off with a CLI, that is easy to configure. There is a full handbook that describes the full process, and it is on their website. FreeBSD is an operating system, rather than a distribution of cobbled together packages. Due to this, operating system binaries, and package binaries, are separated. This makes configuration on the OS level consistent.
A lot of Linux programs come from the BSD family. FreeBSD also has its own hypervisor, named Bhyve. FreeBSD has its own version of Docker as well, they are called jails. It might take some time to learn, but I promise it will be worth the time.
I’ve been running Debian stable for years now on everything. My laptop runs it, my home server runs it headless with no GUI installed, my gaming desktop runs it and even my kids run it without issue. If we need a newer version of some desktop app I just get the Flatpak. It’s pretty great and the good thing is that it’s predictable. Once it’s up and running I don’t have to worry about things breaking because of an update.
You already figured it out. It’s Debian stable.
Personal and general purpose: KDE Neon (yeah yeah)
Servers: IDK, now. Probably going to check out SUSE.
Con: KDE Neon dropped LTS support.
What do you mean by this? Its currently based on 22.04 LTS? Can’t find anything about them going to non-LTS
Yes, KDE Neon is based on 22.04; but their team ended updates for Neon 20.04 this autumn while Ubuntu 20.04 is supported till april 2025.
If they ditch an LTS before its eol date, it’s no more an LTS, is it?
They forced me to upgrade 2.5 years earlier than expected, and then the update went bad.
I’m quite pissed at this distro.
Switched to MX Linux.
Much happier.
I can throw in a vote for Debian stable as well. I’ve recently installed Debian 12 and I’ve been blown away by how great it’s been compared to my recent Fedora 38 experience out of box.
What kind of hardware are you running it on? I’ve started using Debian for servers, but I’m still using Fedora for laptops, currently. I am always curious about different options.
This is my daily driver tower.
- i9 10850k
- ASUS TUF Gaming Z590-Plus
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER
I don’t use wifi however it did work out of the box. The only thing that required additional setup was the Nvidia card but the driver was available in the repos.
If you do end up testing it out on a laptop let me know how it goes. I have a Windows laptop lying around here somewhere that could use some love.
Will do ! It looks like your stuff is pretty recent. 13th gen seems to be a bit different for Intel because of the processor layout and I think requires a new kernel version and that’s what I apparently have
NixOS
Reproducible and unbreakable
With great power comes a steep learning curve.
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
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?
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 (other AppImages seem to work fine)
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. I didn’t solve the Slippi thing myself.
OK, that’s great news, thank you for your reply! :)
Debian stable, but Alpine and Guix are also worth considering.
How has hardware compatibility been for you with Guix? It seems compelling g to me but my understanding is that it strictly avoids non-free blobs
My answer was “Debian stable”; I haven’t used Guix yet; sorry if that was unclear.
But I appreciate Guix’s strict open source policy and it is still possible to get non-free firmware if necessary—see guix-nonfree.
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.
OP wants to get away from RHEL and RHEL-adjacent distros. CentOS Stream and Fedora are still in the same ecosystem and are heavily influenced by Red Hat. People want to believe that Fedora is separate from Red Hat but when Red Hat fires the Fedora program manager, it’s clear that they hold significant power over the direction of the OS and could easily kill it off/change it like they did to CentOS.
They actually own centos though, and from my understanding the Fedora org isn’t ran by RedHat, just sponsored.
Have to also add to the voices recommending Debian stable. I’ve used it now for ten straight years after I stopped distro-hopping for my servers and desktop, and I cannot imagine using another distro. It’s incredibly stable, but the best part of Debian is the absolutely expansive repositories that even the Arch User Repository can’t beat. Very rarely do I ever need to use Flatpak (ugh) for packages, or look to add in new external repositories.
expansive repositories
That would be new for me. AFAIK Debian doesn’t have that many packages (compared to AUR or even nixpkgs (see https://repology.org/)). Regarding Flatpak: What packages do you need for a server with Flatpak? Desktop makes sense for me, but I haven’t yet had any use-case/package for server related software in Flatpak.
I switched from Debian to NixOS for servers, 3 years ago, as I think it’s easier to maintain long-term (after being on Debian on servers for years). A new install (after EOL Debian support) often is a little bit more hassle and requires a longer downtime in my experience (apart from the lack of reproducibility and declarativeness and the sheer amount of software packaged and configured in nixpkgs).
@americanwaste @bzImage
Honestly Ive had the inverse experience where the package I need is only in AUR and not debian repos, but at least we can agree that Flatpak and Snap are terrible
