best professional server Distro option?
1mon 11d ago by lemmy.world/u/Bullerfar in linux@lemmy.ml
I am about to set up a cloud instance with linux operating system, and the common choice here normally would be ubuntu. But since they failed their newest release, and I have the option of going fedora or debian. What would you guys recommend for server?
Best fit is always dependent on how you're planning to use it. Find out what your requirements before you set up a server.
Generally Debian is chosen very often, but I'd wager pretty much any distro will do. Your own experience goes a long way in making a distro a good choice.
Which one has the biggest repositpry libruary off the bat? It's a GUI-less server. So no browser downloading of .deb files anyways.
OpenMediaVault comes with a beginner friendly webui, and all programs from the debian repos are available. It's plain debian under the hood. You can install docker, lxc, k8s and kvm plugins and they are managable from the webui.
Not an option on Scaleway cloud services.
It is going to run af .go application that is the backend for my website. Handling user logins, database translation etc.
Go applications are statically built. So you don't really need anything special on the server for that. Anything will do. Debian would be fine here.
Debian is a great pick. It's stable and has a great support community.
Debian would be the most obvious choice. Perhaps Alma is also a good option. If you would like a european option, OpenSUSE leap can also do the job.
Denian Stable. It just works.
Can't say anything for professional use, but debian is rock solid, always a strong choice for servers.
I personally favour Alpine Linux for its minimalism, but Devuan or Debian are fine, and more familiar choices, too. Depending on what you intend to run, especially appliance-like things, OpenBSD might be a good alternative.
Debian & Alma of course!
DEBIAN
Professional as in an organisation? You should probably start by gathering functional and non-functional requirements from stakeholders.
It's for running a .go app as a backend through an api to my website/app frontend.
Which reverse proxy?
I usually have Debian on all my servers for stability, and run almost everything inside containers for convenience. The few things that run directly in Debian are nginx for reverse proxying to container services, fail2ban+firewall, and wireguard for everything that moves data between servers/computers/devices I own
Debian or Fedora
I personally go with Fedora Server with automatic security updates.
Alpine.
Rhel if you are using professionally. Their enterprise support staff are wizards when it comes to finding the cause of random issues.
Not an option on Scaleway unfortunately
What's failed about their newest release ?
Mostly the uutils.
- MIT license isn't nice.
- They have way more CVEs than the core utils they replace.
- They don't have feature parity yet, so if you use some rare flags in your scripts, those will break.
Code rewrites are always going to have growing pains. Rewriting gnu-corrutils in rust is a noble effort.
Should have used agpl if they wanted to be noble.
But this is just a corpo moating strategy.
Dno, I don't use Ubuntu. Just heard from all my Linux sources (podcasts, forums, etc) that their Newest release sucked.
LOL, you could hear that about pretty much every release of any software.
Maybe, still got me worried about installing v. 26.x.x
I'd go with Debian but it's just a personal preference. I had some difficult to set up a samba server the other day in one of my laptops that was running fedora because of firewall configs that I don't use in Debian like adding context or something. Besides that, I kinda think dnf is better than apt in some ways but still use Debian on my home server. I just works
Hannah Montana Linux
You get a thumbs up for the humour though.
debian, but i prefer devuan personally
Depends on what you mean by professional and your needs.
Debian (stable) is rock solid but (because) slow changing, if your application is slow (or not) changing it's probably the better choice, but if you need new things before it's ready for a new version it'll be pain. It's the professional sysad's choice because they'll likely not have to do anything.
Fedora is faster moving (think cutting edge, not bleeding edge (e.g. Arch) as opposed to Debian's blunt safety) so if you're in active development it's likely a better choice. It is also sort of the testing arm for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is the quintessential professional Distro, so you'll learn some of that along the way.
Just mean stable. Atleast it should not be the distros fault something suddenly isn't working
Debian it is then, it comes in stable, testing and sid (who breaks his toys) also called unstable variants. Unsurprisingly, you'll be wanting stable.
if you need new things before it’s ready for a new version it’ll be pain
Like what?
Also if you need something before Debian is ready for it... you're weird. I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion, solely that you are doing something our of the ordinary. Consequently you should first question WHY you do that in the first place.
Finally if you do need something very specific, containers are there to ... contain that. Running Debian as the host distribution doesn't mean you're limited to it for your applications, servers included.
Valid point re containers, but OP has a wanting bare metal feel IMO. I like and use both, horses for courses, just giving some context.
wanting bare metal feel IMO
Not sure what that means. Typically I would also question people who think containers are "expensive" in the sense of wasting resources. IMHO it's a great compromise to have very weird services while the server itself is very stable.
If you are choosing between Fedora and Debian, definitely go with Debian. Fedora evolves too rapidly for professional use, and its administration requires excessive effort.
I've used rocky Linux on a couple of boxes and it's been very good to me though I've since rationalised everything to Debian for the sake of simplifying my setup.
Not an option at scaleways cloud services.
Do yourself a favor and go with Nixos. Dive head first into to the rabbit hole and set up a repeatable and immutable system. You'll thank yourself later when so many maintenance tasks become a GitOps workflow: update config, commit, push, build, deploy, rollback if it fails
Thank you!
SME here, moving around 300 vms from Rocky to Debian.
But your question is really too vague. Our workflows are quite traditional, but the world is a big place and there is no single right answer here.
My first choice would still be Ubuntu, however if you don't like them RHEL is available for free for homelab's by jumping through some hoops.
Might also take a look at NixOS. Been running it for a while with no issues.
I believe Rocky Linux is also a free clone of RHEL.
Professional? And you're just switching vendors because you "want to"?
Github has zero 9's so at this point just use Arch for everything fuck it
(I would personally recommend Debian)
I would use Ubuntu LTS (free) or Redhat Enterprise Linux. If paying is not an option, some RHEL derivate would probably also work.
Care to elaborate how Ubuntu failed newest release?
yea, ubuntu 'failing' is news to me, too. their infrastructure has been hammered by bad actors, and pre-release daily spins were at-times a bit rocky, but the release itself (barring a few potential issues on the desktop with all the changes) seems to be solid.
I think there are many right answers, and in the end it's dependent on your personal likings. I am self-hosting using Fedora, and I couldn't be happier.
How did Ubuntu fail their newest release?
Professional Server grade distro, would probably be either Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or OpenSUSE Enterprise Linux.
For my personal homelab server I run Arch Linux, but I wouldn't do it in an enterprise.
openSUSE is sadly not an option at scaleway. Otherwise it wasn't a choice xD
Both Debian and RHEL-like distros are solid choices. Both are super stable. Debian tends to not always have the newest packages, so if you want that I'd steer away from Debian. Personally I use Rocky Linux for my servers. It's based on RHEL, meaning each new major version benefits from Red Hat's 10 years of software support. Debian (and derivates) have better community support I think, but RHEL has very solid documentation (which for the most part applies directly to Rocky, Alma etc.)
Here's a great article outlining the differences between Alma and Rocky.
But for something simple like running a Go application, both should work just fine, so choose what you're most comfortable with.
Rocky is available at Scaleway too.
how common is ubuntu on servers?
Much more common than is should be.
I’ve run Ubuntu servers for over a decade in some very large and demanding environments and have had so few issues with the OS itself.
Lemmy has a hate boner for Canonical, and Ubuntu, but the reality is this is an echo chamber. Ubuntu has been run in basically every corner of the globe for some of the most critical work human kind has, and it could be so easily swapped for Debian. But it isn't.
At my workplace 95% is running ubuntu. Those servers that doesn't, are running crappy Microsoft server, and those are just because the applications weren't yet running on linux, but everything does now, so I gues they will switch to ubuntu very shortly.
interesting, i had no idea
People shit on it but there's a lot of good open-source tooling that supports it.
There are nist l1 profiles
Tutorials and guides for everything
etc
Part of being a good sysadmin is knowing when not to reinvent the wheel. Ubuntu has a lot of options for vetted, hardened, "other people's wheels."
Also, for posterity, the competent ones are running the headless, server version of Ubuntu. (As opposed to the bloated mess that is Ubuntu Desktop). The server version catches a lot of flack it doesn't deserve.
i didn't shit on it, i am on kubuntu rn. i just never heard of it being a thing in the server world.
It is the biggest os server wise in the world. Everything on aws runs ubuntu as well. Any SaaS is ubuntu. You cannot get around it datacenter or SaaS wise.
arch linux btw
Slackware, be bold.
I’ve seen mostly RHEL in professional server environments.
My AI says I should always choose Debian 12 (last stabel) instead of 13 (latest build). Is this still a thing? Not hosting applications that needs to be reliably run on latest builds?
Classic AI Garbage!
Debian 13 is stable and the latest stable you can get...
This page has options for downloading and installing Debian 13.4.0, the stable release.
Debian 13 download page, source of quote
I'm running on Debian Trixie since release last year with exactly zero issues, you can hardly get more stable than with Debian.
❤️
The current stable release is Debian 13. Choosing 12 is nonsense.
Debian is already noiriously lagging behind latest package versions (that's how they make it so stable : they freeze all package versions when they release a new version of Debian, and only backport security fixes).
Either your AI was trained before Debian 13 came out, or it is giving you really bad advice. I can't think of a single good reason to use an older Debian for a fresh install...
To find out the actual current latest stable, just check the site: https://www.debian.org/releases/
The stable distribution contains the latest officially released distribution of Debian.
This is the production release of Debian, the one which we primarily recommend using.
The current stable distribution of Debian is version 13, codenamed trixie. It was initially released as version 13.0 on August 9th, 2025 and its latest update, version 13.4, was released on March 14th, 2026.
Good to know! I am pretty sold on Debian.