Fedora, Debian or Alpine? reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ziritione85 · 2023-11-13 15:26 I have a Pi, which I currently use to host some services (pihole, ghostofolio, bookstack, vaultwarden, homepage, portainer and CASAOS). Now I have a small GigaByte Brix with an Intel N processor (2 cores), 8 GB of ram and 1Tb SSD. Works great, passive heatsink, zero noise. I'm going to use it for Immich, and transfer from the Raspi VaultWarden and Ghostfolio and something else (maybe nextcloud). I've been testing with Fedora Server, Debian, and Alpine Linux. In all three cases, you should always tap here and there to get the system "ready." But for the "long term" it seems that Fedora is more solid, + it includes cockpit by default. I loved Alpine, it is simply fast, but it always requires more touch-ups. Debian seems, as we say in my country, "the known dog" but the apt system seems like a real mess to me. Opinions? CasaOS will not be installed here. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ElevenNotes · 2023-11-13 15:33 As someone who runs hundreds of servers in production on Alpine providing thousands of applications, I am very strongly biased to Alpine and get constantly downvoted on all subs where I even mention Alpine (so be prepared for your downvotes too). Choose what you like, in the end it does not really matter. You have your own preferences, whatever they might be. These preferences make me choose Alpine for everything, and someone else would use Ubuntu for everything. Pick what makes you **happy** and feel **good**. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ziritione85 · 2023-11-13 15:37 What makes you happy about Alpine? I will go Alpine, but I there’s no that big amount of information around the web. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ElevenNotes · 2023-11-13 15:49 - Size, its only 200MB - Drivers: It supports all my server hardware, including NIC’s (Mellanox) out of the box - Simplicity: I love eth0-n and hate anything else - No netplan, simple config file, everything file based, no cloud, no weird setups to be run - No GUI, at all - Can copy/paste entire OS including configuration from USB - I love the read-only mode which boots from USB and makes your OS un-persistent like a switch OS, have systems like this run since years without any problems or SD/USB wear - apk and openrc - 100% POSIX musl vs glibc - The name (I live in the alps) - Base layer for most containers, so a no brainer that the host is also the same OS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thekrautboy · 2023-11-13 16:31 Use whatever suits you. If you feel good with Fedora, then use it. If you dont like Debian somehow, then dont. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Cynyr36 · 2023-11-13 16:33 This is also why I'm using alpine. Admittedly its as the os in a container on proxmox. There are a couple of times i want systemd instead of openrc, then i go debian. If i was building a dedicated nas I'd be strongly looking at the alpine on a usb stick option. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ElevenNotes · 2023-11-13 16:47 It's really cool. I run all my bare metal docker nodes like this. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Xenkath · 2023-11-13 16:47 I love Alpine and use it for nearly all my VMs and containers. Systemd is a nightmare headache if you need services to start in a specific order, and Debian in general is overkill if you just want to run a few services in Docker or whatever. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Cynyr36 · 2023-11-13 17:07 What are you using for docker management? I'm kinda a podman guy, and I'm trying to learn quadlets + systemd templates to manage a very small number of instances on one node. I'm just not a fan of the process/socket thing, and how docker kindda takes over networking. Been using openrc on gentoo since 2004 so alpine feels like home, but without all the compiling. I need to figure out how to make my own alpine packages at some point. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thekrautboy · 2023-11-13 18:32 Since you expect downvotes and apparently nobody has done it yet, have a downvote from me :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ElevenNotes · 2023-11-13 21:21 Why have you forsaken me, you were the chosen one! The one that brings balance to this sub! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ElevenNotes · 2023-11-13 21:22 Must admit I use my self developed orchestration that I started long before k8s existed, that's also why I never picked up k8s so far. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thekrautboy · 2023-11-13 21:31 Balance? me? Hmmm. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ElevenNotes · 2023-11-13 21:44 There goes my hope for a bright future of the selfhosted republic. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thekrautboy · 2023-11-13 21:48 Eh, fine with me. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CynicalAltruist · 2023-11-13 22:51 I would say Debian since nearly all programs can be made to work on Debian in one way or another, since Ubuntu is based on Debian and most instructions will work for Debian as well. I do like Alpine but support isn’t as universal, and it does have a couple quirks since it’s so light. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ghulican · 2023-11-14 05:17 Don’t trust a guy who runs Alpine, because he will tell you the truth. If you want to get better at troubleshooting, pick anything else. I got too bored with Alpine because it just works… This is coming from the guy running Ubuntu, and has to support 10s of servers with Ubuntu. It definitely pays the bills ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ziritione85 · 2023-11-14 09:39 I finally chose Fedora, although my heart was with Alpine-linux 😝 The reason. I used Fedora desktop for a long time, and it was the best user experience with Linux I had. I am currently with MacOs but I miss Fedora and GNOME (a lot). It is a robust distribution, with large support and a large amount of information on the web. Furthermore, the cockpit is quite useful to perform some tasks without depending on a terminal in case I need to access it from outside my local network. I think there was no wrong option as some have commented. Just a matter of personal taste. Thanks all