I have been using Debian for about 20 years now. Server and desktop. But I recently migrated all my server stuff to FreeBSD and I don't think I will move back. Jails are great and provide me a convenient way to isolate my apps. On the desktop side I will stay with Debian.
You can't go wrong with Debian
I can throw in a vote for Debian stable as well. I've recently installed Debian 12 and I've been blown away by how great it's been compared to my recent Fedora 38 experience out of box.
What kind of hardware are you running it on? I've started using Debian for servers, but I'm still using Fedora for laptops, currently. I am always curious about different options.
This is my daily driver tower.
I don't use wifi however it did work out of the box. The only thing that required additional setup was the Nvidia card but the driver was available in the repos.
If you do end up testing it out on a laptop let me know how it goes. I have a Windows laptop lying around here somewhere that could use some love.
Will do ! It looks like your stuff is pretty recent. 13th gen seems to be a bit different for Intel because of the processor layout and I think requires a new kernel version and that’s what I apparently have
Can't really go wrong with Debian or Ubuntu server LTS
You can definitely go wrong with an Ubuntu server
Debian stable. The mix of having a stable host but being able to pull in flatpak / appimage / docker containers with newer software is awesome.
Debian yes, but don't install from flatpaks or docker. Neither is secure.
AppImage can be secure if the release is signed.
Docker can pull images securely, but it's disabled by default and many developers don't sign their releases, so even if you enable it client-side there's a risk you'll download something malicious.
Flatpak is never secure because it doesn't support signing of releases at all.
Apt is always secure because all packages must be cryptographically signed (by default).
My vote is Archlinux. Debian is sometimes a little too "optimisitic" when backporting security fixes and upgrading from oldstable to stable always comes with manual intervention.
Release-based distros tend to be deployed and left to fend on their own for years - when it is finally time to upgrade it is often a large manual migration process depending on the deployed software. A rolling release does not have those issues, you just keep upgrading continuously.
Archlinux performs excellent as a lightweight server distro. Kernel updates do not affect VM hardware the same they do your laptop, so no issues with that. Same for drivers. It just, works.
Bonus: it is extremely easy to build and maintain your own packages, so administration of many instances with customized software is very convenient.
You basically recommend to burn money.
Not because of Arch itself and its quality, but because you need to constantly monitor the mailing list for issues and you need to plan a lot more downtimes due to reboot. This is not gonna happen in businesses.
I haven’t been keeping up, what happened?
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/dear-red-hat-are-you-dumb
TL;DR - RedHat is going to wall off all their code/packages behind a paywall meaning the only way to use RedHat is with a paid subscription.
Well that sucks.
Do you know if they will still contribute upstream?
Based on my understanding, Fedora will be unaffected but Rocky & Alma are in some hot water along with Scientific Linux. RHEL is based on Fedora while the others are based on RHEL.
Debian's pretty good, but you can always use RHEL with a free account too
Debian is stable. Arch is bleeding edge and vanilla. if you want something on arch you got to install it and follow the arch wiki
If your solutions are work/job related and need to be distributed I think your current options are SUSE or Debian. If your solution is something only you maintain, you could check out NixOS.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0