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?
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
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.
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.
“Blue is the absolute color” … why ?
I would hope you could say that with every release.
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?
(open)SUSE
What’s motivating you to leave?
SLAAAAAAACKWAAAAARE!!! Slackware is good.
Debian is a nice second.
No package manager, no thanks.
Slackware seems so tedious to me.
Its not for everyone. You do have to activate the slackpkg by uncommenting the mirror you want from the list. There are sbopkg. But if dependencies resolution is also necessary which can be done via sbotools. Extra steps yes but the distro stability is def worth it for me.
I mean, that much more stable than Debian enough to justify the lack of convenience though?
Its whatever makes sense to the situation at hand. Personal preferences will always take presidence. Is it safe to say you want more convinience overall on your prefered OS? Things that allow close to direct use of services without any adjustments to alternatives?
Debian is my go-to for containers and VMs. Stable af. For my laptop and desktop I run pop_os.
Go Debian
I would recommend openSuSe. It is using rpm, but it is an independent distribution.
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 mostly agree with this, I have it on my laptop. Took an hour or two to learn it, used a live image from the website just like any distro. Not for beginners, but someone that is used to arch, after you rtfm it’s fine.
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.
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.
OK, that’s great news, thank you for your reply! :)
I keep hearing that but I definitely managed to break it. And yes it wouldn’t even boot when I rolled back.
Oh dang really? What did you do, so I know what not to do? You couldn’t even rollback???
With a server in mind I’d go OpenSuse Leap.
I use Ubuntu for everything (including at work, tens of thousands machines) and it’s great
I use Ubuntu for everything (including at work, tens of thousands machines) and it’s great
If RHEL-based is no longer an option for OP, how would of all things Ubuntu be the alternative?
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.
