I’ve seen a lot of different enterprise and personal use distros for servers, but what do you guys use?
I’m planning on using Debian but was wondering if there are any other good free options to consider.
We’re primarily a CentOS (6/7, kill me) and Rocky 8+ shop at work, with Debian handling our webservers. My Boss We like Rocky so much, it’s even our base image for all of our containers (ugh).
My experience so far is that RHEL (and derivatives) are pretty solid, and not a bad choice. Though, I’d generally want to avoid the complexity that is SELinux in selfhost endeavors.
Debian and Rocky
For an alternative, when I was looking into server os’s, from what I can tell RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) is the go to since it’s stable. That said RHEL is not free, so what people use to do is get a free OS which is down stream to RHEL, that’s your Alma and Rocky Linux.
However back in 2023 IBM made some changes, and now Alma and Rocky had to rebase off of CentOS Stream which is what RHEL is based off of.
For all intent and purpose I’d recommend using Debain, but Alma and Rocky are alternatives you may want to look into. Personally using Alma and outside of the learning curve of using a RHEL based OS, it has been quite stable.
I use Debian myself but I’m considering switching to NixOS.
Debian as host and Incus + Alpine for containers
