But how do you really feel?
Debian testing?
Is that too bleeding edge?
If I understand your frustrations correctly, you need a server distro that doesn’t take a nose dive every six months, has somewhat recent packages and is low maintenance otherwise? And you need it for a homelab / hosting?
Well, first thing first, I would recommend Debian Stable. Yes, it doesn’t have the most upgraded packages. Why does that matter though? Are you developing bleeding edge software and need the latest versions of PHP and MariaDB? Is your hardware too new for the available kernels? If not, Debian Stable should be your first logical step, since it is very similar to Ubuntu, only much more stable. Thus you do not need to spend a lot of time to get your new production system up and running, and Debian machines typically require very little to no maintenance. Most vendors also provide their software for and support the latest Debian Stable release.
If you need more recent software than what Debian Stable provides, that tells me you most probably want a separate experimentation rig somewhere, either as a VM or as a physical second machine. So, if this is the case, buy a separate experimentation rig on the cheap.
For instance, you could get a brand new Alder Lake system with 6c12t, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB Storage for roughly $500. That would be more than enough for a server experimentation build. Another interesting option could be a NUC system.
At the end of the day, you do you, we all have different use cases, but I think this would be the best way forward for you, from what I’ve understood your use cases are.
1 Like
@wendell OS not FS 
Don’t worry I’ll probably be on ext4 for a long while yet. ZFS doesn’t really make sense for my insane array yet.
@ThatGuyB I found 16 and 18 both super good but I wasn’t using “Ubuntu” but rather Xubuntu. DE is very much preference or workflow so Gnome/Unity etc never really felt right for me. Too many years on fluxbox…long before Ubuntu even existed. I could appreciate some of the ideas for maximizing screen space (like with the netbook version) but it always felt screwy to me. Which is a long winded way of saying I suspect the full Ubuntu version had more “bells and whistles” to go wrong for a lot of users that you experienced where the XFCE version lacked all those little features that caused the bad experience for you.
The reality of a lot of this is a universe of differing preferences or installed package variables that could cause vastly different experiences. I mean this is why Apple treats you like a idiot baby. If you can’t change anything you can’t have a different experience than someone else. As long as they can keep you in the box they control the variables. Here with personal preferences and vastly different use cases it’s the wild west for experience.
In respects to Ubuntu 18.04 I noticed each point release broke something but it wasn’t until I left Ubuntu I was finally able to figure out why and it actually wasn’t Ubuntu’s issue. It was a comical side effect because Ubuntu is very behind in a lot of ways. So over the 18.04 life changes to GTK3 were slowly showing up with each point release. GTK on version 3 stopped enumerating XScreens which completely destroys my set up. This is why even now in Garuda (Arch) I am sitting on a held XFCE 4.12. Sadly the packages are a tad too new and somethings are broken but I can manage as now GTK is 100% unusable and all the non-GTK based DE are broken in other ways. While testing this is seems KDE is now capable of correctly dealing with things but this is off topic and more of a Desktop issue. Just all part of how Ubuntu slowly fell apart heh.
@risk I don’t need bleeding edge, in fact I’d rather stay old as long as there aren’t security issues. Few years ago I was working on making all my stuff as bleeding as possible because a project I was working on called for a lot of very VERY bleeding mechanisms. Google destroyed all that and I rather literally said F this and canned everything. Now I just maintain the stuff I use which honestly would be fine on crap from 10 years ago heh. PHP 5 if you drift my catch. I despite the arbitrary changes big updates impose.
@wertigon An OS that doesn’t self destruct with ANY/Every update (which Ubuntu Server has been doing). As noted before this, packages can be from 1803 (the year) for all I care so long as the security patches are there. I’m going with Debian Stable. Comically when I was looking at the packages I was like MY GAWD that would have saved me so much work over the last few months…i.e. I’d not have had to go nuts updating millions of lines of code for the BS that is mysql8 or php8. Sure eventually I will but it would have allowed me to take my time and lean into it rather than sprint.
Canonical has just been off the rails and doesn’t seem like there going to pull up from the nose dive. Cue jokes about them flying a train. Again though once upon a time .04 was LTS .10 wasn’t…then LTS was that was 5 years became 3…then .04 was maybe LTS but maybe not…Ubuntu has become like a bouncy castle that some kid before you puked in…
As for MariaDB that’s a “when I get time” thing. Another gripe which may or may not apply to Ubuntu is it seems any time there is an update to MySql anymore the service is never handled correctly on update, start up or shut down resulting in hung machines, corrupted databases and all sorts of other fun things. So I may be migrating to Maria if I can get the motivation given my old/apathetic arse is ready to squirt lighter fluid on things, toss a match on it and laugh maniacally until the toxic fumes give me cancer.
Which is to say I love tech but I’ve also been at it long enough to be fed up. So I’ve decided I need to go thrift store shopping (something we don’t have here) so I can find an old ass VCR or better yet a Beta…then gut it, toss in a Raspberry Pi so I can have a tiny box that runs basic things but the flashing 12:00 on the front says OLD MAN NO CARE! It’s like a Futurama joke…the inside says I’m hip and with it, the outside says I’m dead inside.
1 Like
I had problems with Ubuntu with Unity 7, Ubuntu with Plasma5 and Kubuntu (reinstalled). And my colleagues had problems with Ubuntu with both Unity and with GNOME Shell. All starting from 18.04. Some of the weirdness from 18.04 seemed to have been fixed in 20.04 on the GNOME Shell Ubuntu edition, but it still had issues. Besides, I had issues with Ubuntu on the server since 18.04 too, so the DE has nothing to do with it (I run servers headless).
Which is why I am now following a minimalist approach. Less things to go wrong, less potential bugs, due to smaller code base. The most complicated software I use is a web browser, because the internet basically stops functioning if you try to use something lightweight. A tilling WM with keyboard shortcuts and a terminal has been getting me by quite well for a while now (1.5 years or so).
Debian is not a bad choice. I would have recommended Rocky and Debian, but in the OP you mentioned you wanted a rolling release without being bleeding edge. Void and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed fit that description. Fedora and Alpine are fixed releases with a lot of new packages, making it a good compromise between really stable and latest packages.
I suppose Debian has better (a lot better) quality control than Ubuntu, and given your familiarity with it, you should feel like home. Personally, I started growing on RHEL clones, CentOS 5, 6 and 7 were really rock solid and not that difficult to manage, I was impressed. For long term systems that won’t see a lot of restarts, I may go with Rocky, but I have developed a desire to restart services and OS and make sure everything is working fine.
@ThatGuyB Strange you had issues on 18 server though that was when I started having the mysql issues. For me the big issues showed up with 19.04 + though I tried to avoid 19.xx I did try both 4/10.
I completely agree with the minimalist approach which is why I also kinda default to thinking the more kitchen sink flavors had a lot more moving parts to go wrong. Also why I used LXDE for so long…until QT came along. Though now even if it had stayed GTK it would be unusable. “Thanks Obama” joke but with Thanks Gnome…This is also why I stay away from things like Gnome and KDE though now I’m kinda forced into KDE if the day comes my held packages end up presenting other issues. This is an issue for my workstation though. So much of the ecosystem touches on GTK and Gnome has set out to destroy setups like mine in an Apple like myopic view on use case. The minimal concept is also kinda why I was thinking about going back to NetBSD. Build everything I need with minimal cruft. More so this is also one of those I know what is going on things. With a lot of distros I find each release you don’t really know what changed until you trip over it and by then it might be too late so to speak.
See I looked at Suse Tumbleweed and grabbed Leap for testing instead. The wording didn’t directly say rolling BUT stable heh. (Just pulled up another blurb on it) You’re right it does seem to be what I was hoping someone would suggest. A rolling release with a focus on testing those releases for stability. The wording does carry a tad bit of a contradictory feel though but I suppose, grab, play around, see if it fits and “roll” with it if it does. Dad joke…not sorry ;p
1 Like
If I have to configure desktops that I may need to share with others (like for example a presentation TV or something like that), I use LXQt. Lightweight, gets out of the way, does its job and it’s intuitive enough for people to figure out how to use. My main desktop runs sway.
Why would you be stuck in KDE? If you meant the KDE stack, as in, programs like Okular and Gwenview, then I understand, but otherwise, LXQt has a lot of lightweight alternatives, and there are other qt alternatives not bound to the KDE stack, like notepadqq.
1 Like
No I mean like KDE KDE. I used to use LXDE (again flux like, minimal) but much like Gnome 2 => Mate they killed the ability to choose the colors. With no way to actually change from eye burning LAMP mode I had to move to XFCE. However XFCE is based on GTK. One of the things that prompted my Desktop Ubuntu “abandon ship” was the fact every Ubuntu release newer than 18.04 was 100% broken for multi-XScreen/GPU. Later I eventually came across the why (gtk3+). However along the way I found many others were broken for other reasons. I’ve been periodically testing over the last year or so and the latest release of KDE is finally working again. Given what I said about LXQt/DE despite a zillion options I’m kinda left with one. Though I will admit I had thought about the classic NetBSD style CTWM set up, which I use on a few of my other single GPU/Screen systems. I think that would be a tad strained on my workstation though but I’ve not fully fleshed out the concept. XFCE near the end of the 4.12 release was horribly broken. I can’t use panels for example unless I have separate ones on every XScreen and even then they have to be scripted because how XFCE panels work lack the logic to be laid out correctly anymore. They do a lot of idiotic things like % for widths and under some circumstances the logic changes which just breaks things. I’ve reported these issues for years but they always got ignored…to which I found out through other research was because it was stuff they couldn’t fix due to GTK being worthlessly broken now.
For reference last I checked the GTK source
/* Previously, gdk_display_get_n_screens. Since Gtk 3.10, the number of screens is always 1. */
- Debian.
- Open Suse.
In the end It’s all Linux just pick something.
There is no such thing as one distro is better then the other debate.
it simply depends on the use case scenario´s which are always personal.
You have not really specified what you particular server OS use case scenario is.
So i could basically list any Linux distribution right here.
I actually do say the use case in the third paragraph. Odd…
Ah okay i might have missed that reading trough the many text walls haha.
Anyways i think that others have give pretty good suggestions above.
My suggestion goes to Open Suse as well.
It’s really reliable native snapshotting etc like @Mastic_Warrior already pointed out.
Next to that you could also choose any file system you want.
And i believe also live kernel patching which reduces down times to the minimum.
1 Like
@ThatGuyB So as I said a few days ago after posting I checked out both Suse Leap and Tumbleweed. I’m really kinda scratching my head about Tumbleweed. Its description kinda makes it sound like yeah it’s what I want as in a rolling release that only rolls something out once deemed stable. Yet everything else I read (including the blurb beside the one I just said about testing and stability) it’s got the bleeding knife icon and seems everything else online I read basically paints it the same as say Arch. So back to Debian lol.
@MisteryAngel See above about Suse…Tumbleweed has me really going WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU!? heh. One thing is looking at the release cycles if I do only have the point release option I think Debian still wins because the super long release windows enable my apathetic sick of reinstalling state of being. Aside from the downtime during an upgrade perhaps stock Debian will actually succeed.
I just gave two recommendation above.
Do with it what ever you want. 
Not YOU ;p It’s the question of what the hell is Tumbleweed!? It’s like saying “This food is salty, sweet, spicy, and bland.” - Say what now? It’s is a basic rolling or is it actually the kinda hybrid I’d hoped for.
Yup Tumbleweed is kinda weird but it´s mainly rolling as far as i know.
Leap is the more stable branche.
Debian is something you can´t really go wrong with either.
In the end it´s just a matter of trying out what works best for you.
1 Like
Yeah which is why Debian has always kinda been on the table. I grabbed Leap originally because it was described as the stable of the two but the blurbs about Tumbleweed almost make it sound like it’s also to be taken as stable, but some how bleeding edge…you know black and white but not gray hehe. Seems like Debian is really the best/lazy choice. Familiar, slow release windows, capable, stable among other things.
I had really hoped there would be some obscure hybrid I’d not caught wind of. Point releases feel like some antiquated mechanism for a proprietary product where you there is a hard cut off to force you to buy and migrate to the next. Rolling makes sense when something is on going, so it’s unclear why there is no rolling that only rolls at a reduced pace with a focus on the stability of a point release style distro.
1 Like
Tumbleweed is just that. OpenSUSE unstable is called Factory if I recall correctly, which is kind of like Debian Unstable. Following that comes OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Packages are tested for stability, but they are pretty close to the latest releases. Not bleeding edge like Arch, but more of “stable rolling” as opposed to a stable fixed release.
Fedora does get very new packages too, despite it being a fixed release. So does Alpine. But both Fedora and Alpine, you have to upgrade the base to a new release every now an then. Tumbleweed does away with that, it implements slight modifications over time and it works out really well for it. Leap is more like RHEL or Debian, stable fixed release with old packages.
I would make 3, maybe 4 categories for distros:
- fixed release, stable old packages (RHEL, Debian, OpenSUSE Leap, Ubuntu LTS)
- fixed release, stable latest packages (Fedora, Alpine)
- rolling release, stable latest packages (Tumbleweed, Void)
- rolling release, bleeding edge (Arch)
It really depends on your preference. Void for me never broke due to updates and I never had to reinstall it. But as a server, if you aren’t running a limited number of things that need to start in order, runit is a bit limiting. As a desktop platform, it’s great. Hoping it gets better once we get s6 / suite66.
OpenSUSE, running systemd doesn’t have the service dependency issues. Well, neither does Void, but it takes time to make that check, while systemd has service dependency verification built-in.
I would say that if you want stability and don’t want things to change, Rocky or Debian (or NetBSD) are great on that. If you want latest packages that are stable and not completely bleeding edge, go with Fedora, Alpine or Tumbleweed. Among all of these, Tumbleweed seems to best fit your described desires from a Linux distro.
As Angel said, pick your poison basically. I doubt anyone will come with new suggestions, maybe we’d hear someone mention the unofficial MX Linux headless or Devuan, but I personally wouldn’t run those.
“If you liked it you should’ve put a test on it :)”
It’s a Beyonce meme from work where people from A complain when team B updates a library that team A behavior depends on implicitly
FWIW I use a small x86 box as a router - basically a kernel and a small handful of other packages like systemd and iptables, some crypto stuff, some monitoring stuff, nginx, docker.
Nothing too complex.
It’s running Debian testing, backs up incremental btrfs snapshots all the time and I have unattended upgrades enabled which just goes and upgrades everything for me all the time without me even looking.
It’s only been a few months, but I’ve had no issues so far.
1 Like
Putting a Beyonce meme on it can often times mean having identical hardware for the fail over…which I don’t. ;p I can’t really say I’ve EVER had the need to worry about something screwy going on after the fact until the Ubuntu 20.xx+ releases. Normally I just test in a VM, then maybe pull out one of the retired machines if I’m feeling crazy but my main server is such “generic crap” there isn’t really any need to worry about quirks because it’s got some whack controller or chipset.
I’d rather just go stock “stable” Debian, again SLOW release windows. Unless there are security patches I don’t care to fool with things. If I was still working on my previous projects I would. Back then there were actually planned features in some of the things I used that I was waiting on to be able to implement things. Now, thanks to the fact Google has played the long game and screwed up my projects (long story) I don’t care about features and I worry about depreciation of what I have. If it wasn’t for security issues I’d not update at all anymore minus maybe say Blender and Inkscape and that’s workstation stuff. Hell I don’t even like it when my DAW has a new release haha.
1 Like