I switched back to Debian.

Me too

Me three. I was surprised how same it all was. Except for the snaps! Debian doesn't force you to use snaps. This was perhaps the top reason I switched.

Ha! Ditto. I abhor snaps.

I think debian is a polular choice

FreeBSD

I personally use Debian both on my servers and desktops, for the last 15 years or so.

Marketing, man. Ubuntu did more for Linux than a lot of other things by just lowering the bar of entry.

Ubuntu has been the easy default for things like WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) for my coding on Windows, and a linux VM on my home server. But I don't really like the idea of having a distro that doesn't treat security patching with urgency in the age of AI-fueled exploits. Need a standard distro with decent hardware support, low churn, and fast patching.

People are saying Debian. What are the tradeoffs? (other than faster patching on Debian of course)

Nothing really. Ubuntu is just a wrapper around Debian. If you are familiar with Ubuntu, it's basically exactly the same.

I am someone who believes ALL Linux distros are basically the same but on the other hand Ubuntu does use some things like it's own network manager that is not the same as Debian as far as I know. And it has a working remote upgrade functionality which I used just yesterday. On Debian the process is manual and is not recommender to actually do.

> What are the tradeoffs? (other than faster patching on Debian of course)

Older packages, but that's one of the reasons I use it. On the stable branch you will only get security fixes and very rarely updates for critical bugs.

If you need to use newer packages the testing branch is surprisingly stable (it is the base for Ubuntu) but there are a lot of updates.

Rocky Linux. But I've built my career working with RHEL-compatible/derivative distros like CentOS, Fedora.

[delayed]

That is a wild take, especially consider the GP asked for a server use-case. Do you just assume that all new versions should be taken as soon as possible for all packages?

There is a balance: too outdated is bad, too eager for new versions is bad. The tradeoff that LTS tries to take is older, proven versions but with relevant security fixes quickly.

Not a wild take at all. Most server use cases already use containers to precisely specify what the server workload depends on, and can only access what's in the container. I see no reason for the base system to move slowly with proven versions. Even if you don't use containers, you most likely already use language-specific tools to lock in your dependencies. Leave these to the app developers and the sysadmin can move at any speed.

>...I suggest you use a rolling distro

This doesn't seem to be popular with linux though. It's one thing I like about FreeBSD, everything is easy to keep very bleeding edge.

Maybe Debian 'testing'?, is that commonly run in prod?

>>...I suggest you use a rolling distro

> This doesn't seem to be popular with linux though.

Nobody gets fired for buying IBM.

Nobody gets fired for choosing Java.

Nobody gets fired for choosing Debian.

Amazon Linux (2023, or 2027 once it's out of preview).

Devuan, it's debian without systemd.

What's wrong with systemd? I thought this boat had sailed

I use Rocky Linux on my web servers and hypervisors.

However, since I run a VPS host most of my customers run Debian or Ubuntu, due to both being more approachable than RPM-based distros.

I'm not a huge Ubuntu fan due to it being a very heavy downstream of Debian, versus Rocky which is 99.9% RHEL. I hold no grudge against Ubuntu, they made desktop Linux very approachable when Mandriva, Knoppix, et al. weren't.

But Canonical is too much of a downstream versus Red Hat, constantly losing standards wars. And unlike BSD (where I can understand) Canonical is a downstream by choice. It's like Sony who keeps losing standards wars to rivals.

Even in my homelab EVE-NG runs on Ubuntu.

for personal use I'd go with NixOS. NixOS "Unstable" is both pretty reliable and receives latest feature updates a lot faster than stable branches. Nix is simply the fastest to iterate with, for me personally, and having a VM or a Docker image declared right in my flake is something I love.

for something more serious than a personal project, I'd go with Debian because of their vast free support windows and some incredible companies providing extended support

I still just use Ubuntu honestly

Honestly Ubuntu doesn't even come to mind as a candidate... Alpine, debian, nix, distroless, scratch, Amazon Linux, coreos are what come immediately to mind that I'd expect to see.

NixOS, naturally.

Debian is the only sane answer.

Well, I do use Arch on a lot of my VMs but still.