Moving away from RHEL based distros, whats good ?
Hi, mostly i use REHL based distros like Centos/Rocky/Oracle for the solutions i develop but it seems its time to leave..
What good server/minimal distro you use ?
Will start to test Debian stable.
You can't go wrong with Debian
I'm going to throw my support behind this one as well. I'm circling back to Debian after a long stint on Fedora on my primary machine. I've been running Debian 12 on my desktop for several weeks now and it's been pretty great.
it is one version behind fedora in gnome releases, so I installed the latest gnome from the experimental repos and that worked pretty well. I don't know if I would recommend that for anyone else, but it worked for me.
I have a few personal servers still running CentOS 7, but I will be migrating them to Debian slowly over the next few months. I suspect I will go fine. Debian organization to maintain FOSS ideals over the next 5 to 10 years, so it seems like a good default for me.
I have read about Vanilla OS. It is Debian based with some neat features stacked on top that might be fun for a desktop OS. I can see myself switching to that on the desktop if they deliver on all their promises.
Life long Debian (and Debian derivatives) user (23 years and counting). I have pretty much settled down into (this has been true for years):
As an old fart, I'm happy to see that Debian is still cool. All of this arch-manjaro-nix-os-awesome-bspwm-i3-xmonad-flatsnap whippersnapper stuff is over my head.
Realistically, it doesn't make sense for folks to be using bleeding edge distros like Arch for a server anyway. LTS of Debian or even Ubuntu are definitely the right answer
Back when I was hyper into Arch I used it for my servers. "Why not make it the same as your development environment?". Anyways, that immediately stops working when your development environment changes. For a server, just use Debian or Ubuntu.
"flatsnap". This made my day
I'm all for using Debian and such, and I think out of all the new and hip things people brag about, using Flatpak is the most useful thing for the average user experience and worth checking out. Everything (almost) else is just extra.
As an old fart, Devuan is like debian of yesteryear. Debian without systemd.
@withersailor @Borgzilla There's also #Elive Retrowave to consider.
You get to choose in the installer which system you want.
You already figured it out. It’s Debian stable.
Will start to test Debian stable.
This is a smart move.
Debians make for very good servers, I've been using Debian servers since moving my desktop from Fedora (when it was still called Fedora Core) to Ubuntu. I don't regret it one bit. The community is excellent, and there is ample information available online without having to ask a new question.
I would recommend openSuSe. It is using rpm, but it is an independent distribution.
Huge fan of openSuse Tumbleweed. Rolling release like Arch with the backing of a decently sized organization.
I think OpenSuSe is really the best alternative. As much as I like Debian, OpenSuSe will be pretty comfy for someone coming from RHEL.
Until it is clear, how Leap 16 will look like, I would not start to use it now.
Debian.
Go Debian
Debian 12 just released this month too! It has LXD in the repos now, no snap required.
Desktop? Arch. Server? Debian, NixOS.
If you're up for it: NixOS!
It's quite a steep learning curve, but after some time (after you've configured your "dream-system") you don't want to go back/switch to any different distro.
Specifically servers IMHO are a great use-case for NixOS. It's usually simpler to configure than a desktop distro, and less of the usual pain points of "dirty" software (like hardcoded dynamic libraries, that exist on most systems (ubuntu as reference) at that path).
I've much less fear maintaining my servers with NixOS because of its declarative functional reproducability and "transactional" upgrade system, than previously (where I've used Debian mostly).
The thing about NixOS is that while using packages are easy, creating them are still really hard and/or undocumented.
With most popular services already being packaged by people who know what they're doing this isn't that big of a deal, but when I want to try out something from Joe Schmoe's GitHub (or worse, something I made myself) it is much easier for me to throw together a "good enough" Dockerfile and compose.yml together in barely a hour of work than to dig into Nixpkgs internals and wrestle with Nix's syntax.
Kind of depends what you want to package. For projects that force you to provide dependencies yourself (e.g. most C or C++ projects), Nix packaging is very easy to use. Just slap a flake.nix together with the necessary dependencies, where to get the source from and how to build it.
Where Nix gets really difficult is with packages that reinvent their own packaging system and do dynamic downloads at compile or even runtime. Those really do not harmonize with Nix, as the Nix build process happens in isolation without network access and wants to have all dependencies specified beforehand, with checksum and all.
When it comes to languages with their own package manager it also gets a bit complicated, as while Nix does come with workarounds for all the common cases, there are generally multiple ways to do it, e.g. you can use mach-nix, pypi2nix, buildFHSUserEnv or buildPythonPackage to build Python packages and it's not always obvious which is the best approach or which will even work.
Packages that softly depend on other packages via some kind of plugin mechanism are also tricky, due to Nix packages all being isolated in their own directories. Again, which workaround works best here can be tricky, some packages require specifying all the plugins at package build time others use environment variables or other means to locate plugins.
All that said, these issues are kind of fundamental when you want to have a proper reproducible packaging system and hard to avoid. I do prefer a system that forces some cleanliness from the ground up instead of adding ever more ugly patchwork on top, but I can understand why that can be at times very frustrating.
Well I guess it depends how deep you're in the rabbit hole already, I think it's relatively easy for me at this point to create a new package (I'm maintainer already for quite a few). But yeah ... steep learning curve ... Less so with Nix itself, though non-the-less, it's a simple functional programming language with a new paradigm (derivations). But rather NixOS/nixpkgs Nix magic. For example there's a dynamic dependently typed type-system built on top of untyped Nix in the NixOS module system that is spin up on evaluation time.
But I understand your point, at the beginning of my NixOS journey I have also rather created a "good enough" Dockerfile. Depending on the exact context I still do this nowadays (often because there's an official well maintained docker image in comparison to a not so well maintained Nix one, and the context is too complex to maintain/develop/extend it myself). But if there's a good solution in Nix I rather use that, and that is often less headache than setting up a service with e.g. docker-compose. I also use flakes mostly for a dev environment, if you're a little bit deeper in it, you can spin up a relatively clean dev env in short time (I'm often copy pasting the ones I have written from different projects, and change the packages/dependencies).
I had a really bad experience with NixOS, the idea is great, but I had a lot of troubles at each generation switch. I don't like it because I had to learn a lot of specific tools, that only applies on that OS, and it was (really.) hard. I prefer a classic distro, maybe Debian (or Freebsd if not linux), with Ansible for declarative config, and ZFS storage to be able to revert a snapshot if I have any kind of problem.
As I said it has a steep learning curve and documentation is pretty much the nixpkgs repo itself (well after understanding the basics of Nix and NixOS at least, with the combination of the https://nixos.wiki mostly IMO). It also takes some time to get used to the quirks of NixOS (and understanding the necessary practical design decisions of these quirks).
But I have nowadays seldom trouble with switching the generations (i.e. nixos-rebuild switch), unless you're updating flake inputs or (legacy) channels (where e.g. a new kernel might be used). In that case it makes sense to reboot into the new configuration. Also, obviously that can lead to short down-times (including just restarting a systemd service, if a service has changed in between the generations), if that is unacceptable, there obviously needs to be a more sophisticated solution, like kubernetes via e.g. kubnix. I'm not sure how much of that can be achieved with Ansible, as I haven't used it that much because I disliked the "programming" capabilities of the Ansible yaml syntax (which feels kinda hacky IMHO).
But apart from NixOS, one can also just use Nix on a different system to e.g. deploy or create docker images (which can be really compact, as only the necessary dependencies for a package is packaged) that in turn could e.g. be managed with Ansible or something...
Honestly, Debian stable has always been my first option. I'll continue using Arch for my desktops and Debian on servers and stuff.
Same here. Went from CentOS to debian (edit: on servers) when this whole shit show started and never looked back.
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.
Regarding the kernel upgrades: Using the linux-lts package / kernel get's you a pretty reliable setup.
I don't think Arch (or any rolling distro for that matter) is the best solution for a server deployment. If you update rarely, you're bound to have to do manual interventions to fix the update. If you update too often, you might hit some distro breaking bug and you're rebooting very often as well. Those two options are not great on something requiring stability.
Once a year there is a manual intervention. Last one was the repo merge, and that did not even break then. Before that... hmmm... I dont even remember.
On Desktop with nvidia and a lot of other AUR stuff it is more work, but the servers run smooth as butter.
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.
RHEL is designed to be the terminator: a bit outdated, but never stopping and never giving up until it's completely destroyed.
Arch is a house that's being built by a drunk tradie: everything is probably going fine, but you might end up with a front door that opens up to a solid brick wall.
The main benefit of arch is that it has a huge repo of cutting edge packages. That is pretty much completely useless for both development and infrastructure.
Devs don't use cutting edge packages because that can introduce a whole lot of work for no benefits. So for example instead of installing node (cutting edge on arch), they use node-14-lts, just like their infra, until it stops getting support or a feature they need comes out in a newer lts version. And if your app is running on lts packages, you most certainly don't need cutting edge system packages and all of the issues that come with them.
Debian is sometimes a little too "optimisitic" when backporting security fixes
You're not going to be hacked because of a system package. It's going to be a bad library, or your own bad code. Either way, it's got nothing to do with pacman.
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.
We're not back in the early 2000s, upgrading the OS is trivial when you're using tools like terraform, ansible, and docker.
Bonus: it is extremely easy to build and maintain your own packages, so administration of many instances with customized software is very convenient.
Sure you can write a package for pacman and have it available on arch. Or you can write a guix package and have it available on any Linux distro. Or you can write a nix package and then run it on macOS as well. Windows being covered by both of these because of WSL.
I've recently had to write a package for both arch and guix, the guix one was a lot easier and the whole process was a lot smoother. Also you get nice features like transformations, allowing you to only modify the existing package instead of having to rewrite it.
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.
I haven't used it as a server distro, but it was my main desktop distro for the last ~4 years. It crashed every month or two, and failed to boot at least 3 times even with regular Syu's. Before that I ran Mint for 2+ years. It never crashed, it never failed to boot. Other machines I wouldn't update for months. mint had no issues with that and updated perfectly fine. Arch would often crap itself completely, fail to boot, I'd do a btrfs rollback and try again in a week or two. Sometimes that would be enough, other times I had to wait a bit more for shit to settle.
Arch has possible minor benefits, and a lot of possible downsides. It just doesn't make sense to use it on a server, when you can take a rock solid foundation like Debian, and then build on top of it with nix/guix.
We use Ansible as well, it keeps all servers happily upgraded and all packages in working order - even the weirdest custom software instances. Nodjs is available as lts packages im arch and it, again, just works.
I have zero issues with upgrades on desktop and server except once last year when my old Core2Duo notebook I use in the kitchen did not suspend correctly for a whole week until the Kernel bug was fixed. (I ran linux-lts for a week, it was... smooth sailing).
During that time we had 3 failed migrations of old PHP software to the new Ubuntu LTS and were fighting almightly RHEL because it simply did not provide the packages the customer required - we are now running an Arch container on the RHEL box...
I know this discussion is a little bit like religion, and obviously luck and good circumstances play a role. We both speak from experience and OP can make their own decision.
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.
One of my work colleagues actually uses Nix on Debian to distribute a piece of software. Though it is software made for a hardware appliance so that's a bit special.
Honestly, unless you're using Nix within something like docker images (Nix has great support for writing really minimal docker images) or use it to just build software (which is also a great use-case), I would rather go straight to NixOS, in my experience it's a smoother experience than using Nix on a different distro and e.g. services (like standalone home-manager) .
Debian always
Debianlenciaga, after all this time?
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).
NixOS
Reproducible and unbreakable
With great power comes a steep learning curve.
Eh. I mean it's certainly a smaller curve than other "hard" distros like Arch or Gentoo, and there really isn't one at all since the installer does most of the complicated stuff for you.
Would I recommend it to beginners? Probably not as they wouldn't be willing to do any reading, configuring, or time sinking at all.
However, for this use case of building solutions by an experienced Linux user, the 30 min to an hour of learning is really not a lot when it would save a ton of time down the line. It's not like you need to be a nix lang or nixos expert to use it effectively
I keep hearing that but I definitely managed to break it. And yes it wouldn't even boot when I rolled back.
Oh dang really? What did you do, so I know what not to do? You couldn't even rollback???
Debian 12, Opensuse leap or tumbleweed, SLES, Fedora, Linux mint / LMDE, Freebsd, Alma Linux OS
minimal: alpine
general purpose: debian or CentOS, i'll still use it for now.
I've been running Debian stable for years now on everything. My laptop runs it, my home server runs it headless with no GUI installed, my gaming desktop runs it and even my kids run it without issue. If we need a newer version of some desktop app I just get the Flatpak. It's pretty great and the good thing is that it's predictable. Once it's up and running I don't have to worry about things breaking because of an update.
If you need enterprise support I'd look for Ubuntu or maybe SUSE. If you can't tolerate RHEL closing their source, that is (some people won't be bothered).
If that's not needed, then Debian all the way! It's served me well for like 10 years in my home lab.
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.
My first reaction to learning about jails was "why the hell doesn't linux have these".
Linux has this : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-nspawn
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.
Does it require a paid subscription? You can have a free developer account. I didn't see anything in the Red Hat post besides it being available through the customer portal, which you have access to with a free account.
That's IBM for you
For my public-facing server, I use Debian Testing, since I haven't had any major issues with it's stability. Auto-upgrades usually work , although there were a few times I had to manually intervene on the latest name-change upgrade from Bookworm to Trixie. I usually don't even log-in except every few months.
At home, where it will only affect me, and possibly my family dealing with me, if the whole O. S. crashes and has to be rebuilt from backups, I use Arch.
Slackware. Its stable as a mofo.
I used to be Slackware user. Then I sold my soul to RedHat, then to Debian...
I just installed Slackware after reading your message to see what is new, here are my findings:
I can understand why somebody would like to play around with this kind of system as a fun/entertainment/puzzle solving in their free time. On the other hand, if you plan to run some kind of microservices architecture on this, then I wish you best of luck finding a new job once you are fired.
Sounds like its not the tool for you. Thats fine. Could be for countless other people out there.
Damn slackers
We are everywhere!
I like Debian and Alpine for servers (depending on if I can get away with musl or not)
I use Arch for my actual computers because rolling release is the way to go. Saves me ever having to actually do a full OS upgrade.
Debian stable, but Alpine and Guix are also worth considering.
How has hardware compatibility been for you with Guix? It seems compelling g to me but my understanding is that it strictly avoids non-free blobs
My answer was "Debian stable"; I haven't used Guix yet; sorry if that was unclear.
But I appreciate Guix's strict open source policy and it is still possible to get non-free firmware if necessary—see guix-nonfree.
Any issues with CentOS stream for your work? Could always switch to Fedora server too if you wanted to keep the same structures and such, but separate some from RedHat.
Red Hat has alot of sway with Fedora considering they pulled those codecs out of it. That's when I realized it isn't really a community distro.
It think it's more for RH/IBM to test new stuff on the community as opposed to something like Debian or Gentoo that actually has a fairly clear community commitment.
I don't recall a lot community polling and discussion when they moved to systemd, btrfs or wayland.
OP wants to get away from RHEL and RHEL-adjacent distros. CentOS Stream and Fedora are still in the same ecosystem and are heavily influenced by Red Hat. People want to believe that Fedora is separate from Red Hat but when Red Hat fires the Fedora program manager, it's clear that they hold significant power over the direction of the OS and could easily kill it off/change it like they did to CentOS.
They actually own centos though, and from my understanding the Fedora org isn't ran by RedHat, just sponsored.
Tumbleweed or Leap are good. You could go with something exotic like VanillaOS
At least that's how I've been running my homelab stuff for years now.
I run Debian servers and Fedora workstations, which works really well for me. The rock solid stability of Debian is exactly what I want in a server, and the perfect blend of it-just-works and blending-edge that Fedora provides is great for a daily driver.
Unless I'm mistaken, the current ordeal with RHEL should not affect Fedora, as RHEL is a derivative of Fedora in the same way Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian. As such, I see no reason to move away just yet - though if that changes, I'll go OpenSUSE. Arch just isn't for me.
I'm on fedora and it's been fantastic
For server, Debian is great :) i use ubuntu 20.04 lts personally
I would definitely give openSUSE a try. such a solid distro. Debian is also great, popOS seems likeable, nixOS is very very solid, I've used Arch, Manjaro and opensuse myself. currently on arch. but I highly recommend openSUSE
Debian is my go-to for containers and VMs. Stable af. For my laptop and desktop I run pop_os.
I've been seeing stuff about this but I don't quite understand, what does this mean for Fedora? Do I need to switch too?
To elaborate further on what Vani said below, Fedora is an independent community run project but Red Hat does provide some funding to the project. Fedora is also "upstream" of RHEL / CentOS so it is not impacted like Alma / Rocky.
I don't understand what's happening at Red Hat. First they pull the codecs out of Fedora which is supposed to be a community distro so why are company lawyers involved? Now basically closing their source code. I mean technically not violating the GPL cause you only have to have your source available to your customers.
Codecs were never legal to include, community distro or not. The RedHat lawyers told Fedora that, and Fedora removed them
Looks like this sort of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Not really. Any customer can share GPL code, after they get it. Red Hat can't change that, if they use GPL. The issue is, from my understanding, that Red Hat can have some non GPL code to build the final product. So sharing the GPL code itself would not be enough to build a 1 to 1 binary compatible distribution.
At least at theory, because we don' know all details yet. Imagine a situation like the Chrome browser vs Chromium.
I have utilized Debian and Minimum Ubuntu as an alternative to Centos with reasonably pleasurable results
I do also like Absolute for crafting the perfect lightweight install, but it's kind of a pain in the ass.
Have to also add to the voices recommending Debian stable. I've used it now for ten straight years after I stopped distro-hopping for my servers and desktop, and I cannot imagine using another distro. It's incredibly stable, but the best part of Debian is the absolutely expansive repositories that even the Arch User Repository can't beat. Very rarely do I ever need to use Flatpak (ugh) for packages, or look to add in new external repositories.
@americanwaste @bzImage
Honestly Ive had the inverse experience where the package I need is only in AUR and not debian repos, but at least we can agree that Flatpak and Snap are terrible
expansive repositories
That would be new for me. AFAIK Debian doesn't have that many packages (compared to AUR or even nixpkgs (see https://repology.org/)). Regarding Flatpak: What packages do you need for a server with Flatpak? Desktop makes sense for me, but I haven't yet had any use-case/package for server related software in Flatpak.
I switched from Debian to NixOS for servers, 3 years ago, as I think it's easier to maintain long-term (after being on Debian on servers for years). A new install (after EOL Debian support) often is a little bit more hassle and requires a longer downtime in my experience (apart from the lack of reproducibility and declarativeness and the sheer amount of software packaged and configured in nixpkgs).
I'm also moving away from RHEL. I have 3 RHEL servers right now, a hypervisor host, a podman vm, and a Samba share vm. I really liked that you could specify regulatory compliance at install time. Makes it really easy for standing up compliant servers. Are there any distros that do something similar?
Void Linux. It just works.
It indeed just works despite being a rolling release, but still wouldn't recommend it as a server. Desktop usage is what it's meant for.
SLAAAAAAACKWAAAAARE!!!! Slackware is good.
Debian is a nice second.
No package manager, no thanks.
Slackware seems so tedious to me.
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
Gentoo! it can be anything you want on any platform
With a server in mind I'd go OpenSuse Leap.
If you are willing to abandon Linux, I would suggest FreeBSD for general purpose servers.
It is a full operating system, which starts you off with a CLI, that is easy to configure. There is a full handbook that describes the full process, and it is on their website. FreeBSD is an operating system, rather than a distribution of cobbled together packages. Due to this, operating system binaries, and package binaries, are separated. This makes configuration on the OS level consistent.
A lot of Linux programs come from the BSD family. FreeBSD also has its own hypervisor, named Bhyve. FreeBSD has its own version of Docker as well, they are called jails. It might take some time to learn, but I promise it will be worth the time.
I thought very similar after the RHEL moves that Red Hat has made. I was thinking OpenSUSE or Debian, but I am still unsure as what I am going to do.
Slackware because it rules.
OpenSuse for RPM and company backing.
EndeavourOS for "lazy" Arch install.
There is a slackware community in lemmy, if you feel like joining your welcome to.
(open)SUSE
@woelkchen @bzImage I wish I can choose SUSE on Hetzner.
On my Desktop, I switched to Manjaro (Arch-based) from Mint a few years ago. Works like a charm and I like the rolling release model. On servers, Ubuntu, Debian or SUSE might be a good choice.
There are several options. Alma/Rocky, Fedora, Debian, BSD, just to name a few.
What’s motivating you to leave?
Not OP, but I'd assume this
I don't see Oracle changing their distribution any time soon... Even though it's a bit suspicious they are taking so long to certify OL9 for 19c databases..
I'm not saying OP should not jump ship, but I can see RH and Oracle making some kind of deal
If you want easy way - Ubuntu. All packages exist, all developers support. But snap is pain.
If you need mainline packages - Arch. But be care with bugs. Use LTS kernel or you can broke filesystem on one day for example.
If you want forgot about dependencies - NixOS. But Nix not classic packet manager and you can feel pain on start.
In reality, a lot depends on the environment in which your code will work. If it's Java, then in principle it doesn't matter, but if it's C/C++, it's better to develop in an environment as close to production as possible.
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.