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.
Debian’s pretty good, but you can always use RHEL with a free account too
There are several options. Alma/Rocky, Fedora, Debian, BSD, just to name a few.
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?
To elaborate further on what Vani said below, Fedora is an independent community run project but Red Hat does provide some funding to the project. Fedora is also “upstream” of RHEL / CentOS so it is not impacted like Alma / Rocky.
Those distos are for professional use cases mostly. Fedora is fine and there is no need to worry.
Thanks for the heads up, I was worried for a second especially with the recent FedoraFiasco.
The most likely problem that may occur with Fedora because of RHEL’s change is that some developers may just stop building RPM packages entirely. Whether it’s a big enough issue to worry about, only time will tell
You can’t go wrong with Debian
All my servers run debian and it’s going swimmingly. My daily driver runs bookworm with huge success
Bookworm is such a tremendously good release. I’ve been on Debian since Potato, and IMHO we are seeing the absolute best release they ever put out.
I would hope you could say that with every release.
“Blue is the absolute color” … why ?
I’ve used debian on and off since the late 90s, what stands out about bookworm? They’ve been mostly the same to me, not that that’s a bad thing.
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.
Life long Debian (and Debian derivatives) user (23 years and counting). I have pretty much settled down into (this has been true for years):
- Debian for servers.
- Mint for workstations (that you want to just work and don’t want to spend time troubleshooting / tinkering). Mint is linux your grandma can use (my Boomer real estate broker father has been running Mint laptops for the last 5 years).
- Ubuntu for jr. Engineers who want to learn linux.
- Qubes (with Debian VMs) for workstations that must be secure (I’ve been working recently with several organizations that are prime targets either the CCP or have DFARS / NIST compliance requirements).
Debian always
Debianlenciaga, after all this time?
I haven’t been keeping up, what happened?
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/dear-red-hat-are-you-dumb
TL;DR - RedHat is going to wall off all their code/packages behind a paywall meaning the only way to use RedHat is with a paid subscription.
Does it require a paid subscription? You can have a free developer account. I didn’t see anything in the Red Hat post besides it being available through the customer portal, which you have access to with a free account.
Well that sucks.
Do you know if they will still contribute upstream?
Based on my understanding, Fedora will be unaffected but Rocky & Alma are in some hot water along with Scientific Linux. RHEL is based on Fedora while the others are based on RHEL.
That’s IBM for you
Someone fill me in here, what did RedHat do?
I’m also moving away from RHEL. I have 3 RHEL servers right now, a hypervisor host, a podman vm, and a Samba share vm. I really liked that you could specify regulatory compliance at install time. Makes it really easy for standing up compliant servers. Are there any distros that do something similar?
Debian.
I thought very similar after the RHEL moves that Red Hat has made. I was thinking OpenSUSE or Debian, but I am still unsure as what I am going to do.
Honestly, Debian stable has always been my first option. I’ll continue using Arch for my desktops and Debian on servers and stuff.
Same here. Went from CentOS to debian (edit: on servers) when this whole shit show started and never looked back.
Slackware. Its stable as a mofo.
Damn slackers
We are everywhere!
I used to be Slackware user. Then I sold my soul to RedHat, then to Debian…
I just installed Slackware after reading your message to see what is new, here are my findings:
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There is still no auto install. I had to manually configure a lot of things using a terminal based fdisk and setup.
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The default package manager, pkgtool, does not have a default way to auto install packages from web (something like yum, apt, up2date). It only installs from your own HDD.
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The other tool for managing packages, slackpkg, was not installed on my system by default.
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The default configuration for X and KDE has problems on my system. I can see the mouse move then nothing.
I can understand why somebody would like to play around with this kind of system as a fun/entertainment/puzzle solving in their free time. On the other hand, if you plan to run some kind of microservices architecture on this, then I wish you best of luck finding a new job once you are fired.
Sounds like its not the tool for you. Thats fine. Could be for countless other people out there.
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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).
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.
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…
I would definitely give openSUSE a try. such a solid distro. Debian is also great, popOS seems likeable, nixOS is very very solid, I’ve used Arch, Manjaro and opensuse myself. currently on arch. but I highly recommend openSUSE
For server, Debian is great :) i use ubuntu 20.04 lts personally
