See you back on Debian in a few months

You next OS will be... Debian. Because you care about your time and you want stuff to be stable.

always . freaking . debian

I always think about using nixos. But considering I dockerise everything, I always end up using Debian.
Good old stable Debian

Debian. Server? Debian.

My $0.02:

NixOS is excellent, and actually pretty easy if you're not trying to do anything fancy (running all services under a single user, etc.). Personally this is my pick because I primarily host services for myself, so down time in exchange for learning a new thing is acceptable.

As I mentioned elsewhere, Debian + Incus is a great minimal and rock solid solution for longer standing services. Although, it's not composeable :(

More directly to your preferences, I would also recommend considering Rocky. Being in the RHEL ecosystem has its perks (especially with rootless support for podman and podman-compose). I'm also generally a fan of SELinux. Rocky is a little less bleeding edge than Fedora with many of the same conveniences and recent packages. In my mind, for my purposes, that makes it a better choice than Fedora for a server OS.

Fedora Server works well, and the Podman integration is great.

I guess it is the boring option, but probably the best when coming from Ubuntu.

Proxmox.

Each service becomes an LXC. Docker containers can be migrated to LXC, or be contained within an LXC dedicated to docker.

Running out of processing power? Add another server, add to a cluster, and migrate services (LXC or VM) over.

Having run Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, slack, even Oracle Linux - Proxmox is what I run for myself (and some clients).

Not sure what works best in your case. I'm a Debian cat myself but I have been considering openbsd as a future option.

Debian

I'm using FreeBSD now and I have been blown away at how well it just works and gets out of your way. I am using appjail templates to script containerisation of my services

I have used all three! I started with Server then went to CoreOS running Kubernetes and settled on NixOS which I have been very happy with for about a year now. I run about 25-30 services all using built in modules.

Regarding security, if you are using well crafted modules on NixOS, there should be good systemd hardening in place. That being said there is no reason you can't just use containers on NixOS.

I also find deploying NixOS far superior to butane/ignition used by CoreOS/Fedora. I use nixos-anywhere and can deploy my entire server in a few minutes without manual intervention.

I'm probably the odd one out, but my home server is running Arch Linux. And it's been really smooth. I do weekly maintenance in the form of updates and cleanup and it's been reliable since I set it up a couple of years ago.

I use Debian at home on my homeserver and a mix of Debian and Arch for my workstations. Most of my stuff is managed with Ansible to make rebuilding easier and most workloads in podman containers.

Personally I don't overthink the distro thing. I recently started using Arch and quite like it. I've noticed packages that are available in Debian but not Arch and vice-versa. Debian Stable is nice because it's just, well, stable.

Fedora has an annoying release cadence IMO. I have experienced desktop bugs in the early GA releases before which put me off. If I wanted instability I would sooner go with Arch (and I am yet to have many issues with Arch yet).

If I were to go with a BSD for a home server it would probably be OpenBSD or FreeBSD. OpenBSD has vmm and a bunch of tooling around it, and FreeBSD has bhyve and jails. I haven't taken the plunge because Linux works and it's what I know.

These days I hear about people using proxmox on their homeserver with LXC containers and/or VMs.

You might want to consider just Dockerising everything. That way, the underlying OS really doesn't matter to the applications running.

I've got a few Raspberry Pi's running Debian, and on top of that, they're running a kubernetes cluster with K3s. I host a bunch of different services, all in their own containers (effectively their own OS) and I don't have to care. If I want to change the underlying OS, the containers don't know either. It's pretty great.

I really don't see any advantages in your post for choices other than NixOS. I'm sure you'll improve quickly by necessity! :D

If you mainly use containers perhaps OpenSUSE Micro OS is of interest to you. Other then that pretty much any distro will do. I use rocky Linux my self for a few different things.

If you want to try out many different distros virtualization is also a option. KVM or something like XCP-NG with XO or proxmox are great options.

I also recommend a stable/LTS distro like Debian or AlmaLinux (or other RHEL-based distros). Or just keep using Ubuntu Server LTS.

The OS packages being hopelessly outdated doesn't really matter when you're running most services inside containers.

If you want to containerise your apps, you could try Talos Linux. It is an api driven OS tailored to run Kubernetes. There is no bulk, only what is needed to run K8s, i.e., even no ssh server.

You control it with talosctl which calls the gRPC api endpoint to read or write all sorts of state including machine configuration.

I really really like Fedora Server, but any RHEL derivative is my go to for servers. I use Rocky Linux when I need something closer to RHEL, and Fedora server for pretty much everything else. I highly recommend Cockpit as well (main reason I like Fedora server) as it has allowed me to so easily manage all of my servers from a single point.

I use Fedora CoreOS on my homeserver and a bunch of VPSs. Migrated the homeserver just recently, but I've migrated the first VPSs a bit more than a year ago. So far, I had no problems with it. There's a low-traffic mailing list where the devs inform about security issues and breaking changes to the whole container stack.

I used debian before for some years, but at some point became tired of manually updating the system (which is probably one of the biggest benefit of FCOS). It takes, however, quite some time to put your first Ignition config together, and debugging is tedious as you have to redeploy to see if a bug / error is now gone (I've used a VM for that).

I use podman on some, Docker on other servers (you can't use both at the same time). Both have been working well so far.

I'd recommend it, but would also recommend taking a look at Flatcar Linux which is more or less the same without the IBM dependency (which makes my stomach hurt sometimes).

Give Gentoo a shot. It’s super stable and you will understand everything in your system. Also it now supports binary packages

Slackware is a great, simple OS that does what it does and does it well. There will be some getting used to, but when it clicks, it makes sense and doesn't do anything you wouldn't expect. It is great if you want to use containers as it provides you with the stable, simple base to run all your containers on top of.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

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