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?
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
DEBIAN
Denian Stable. It just works.
Debian is a great pick. It’s stable and has a great support community.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Debian or Fedora
I personally go with Fedora Server with automatic security updates.
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.
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.
Can’t say anything for professional use, but debian is rock solid, always a strong choice for servers.
How did Ubuntu fail their newest release?
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.
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
