I want to make a server for hosting media through Jellyfin, and maybe some Nextcloud functionality. I prefer to use containers, but something like TrueNAS’ extensions/plugins sound good as well. This is my first server, so I don’t know what to choose. My possible options are:
- Debian
- Ubuntu
- Fedora
- TrueNAS Scale Which one should I choose? I am fine with using either Docker or Podman. (Edit: The server will be running on an old laptop with a single drive slot.)
frequently updated
Not something I’d want on my server :) Partly joking, their lifecycle makes sense if you stay on the major.minor release. Though I find 2 years security support is a bit short - Debian LTS is usually around 5 years, not an excuse to wait for the last moment to upgrade but I find it more comfortable than just 2 years.
One thing to watch for is that alpine uses musl as it libc, and many programs expect glibc so you might run into obscure bugs. I find it good as base image for OCI images (again there are edge cases), but wouldn’t use it for a general purpose server.
I upgrade as soon as new versions come out, I like living on the edge :) if something goes wrong, there are backups.
As for musl, I haven’t mentioned it since OP wants to run containers - and in that case, musl doesn’t matter. And for running programs natively, many are available as packages (with any musl incompatibilities already resolved). But yeah, if you venture outside these limits, you can definitely run into issues with musl.
