I’ve only ever used desktop Linux and don’t have server admin experience (unless you count hosting Minecraft servers on my personal machine lol). Currently using Artix and Void for my desktop computers as I’ve grown fond of runit.

I’m going to get a VPS for some personal projects and am at the point of deciding what distro I want to use. While I imagine that systemd is generally the best for servers due to the far more widespread support (therefore it’s better for the stability needs of a server), I have a somewhat high threat model compared to most people so I was wondering if maybe I should use something like runit instead which is much smaller and less vulnerable. Security needs are also the reason why I’m leaning away from using something like Debian, because how outdated the packages are would likely leave me open to vulnerabilities. Correct me if I’m misunderstanding any of that though.

Other than that I’m not sure what considerations there are to make for my server distro. Maybe a more mainstream distro would be more likely to have the software in its repos that I need to host my various projects. On the other hand, I don’t have any experience with, say, Fedora, and it’d probably be a lot easier for me to stick to something I know.

In terms of what I want to do with the VPS, it’ll be more general-purpose and hosting a few different projects. Currently thinking of hosting a Matrix instance, a Mastodon instance, a NextCloud instance, an SMTP server, and a light website, but I’m sure I’ll want to stick more miscellaneous stuff on there too.

So what distro do you use for your server hosting? What things should I consider when picking a distro?

  • trachesEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    I didn’t say it was stable, I specifically said it was unstable. Because it is. I said arch is reliable, which is a completely different thing.

    Debian is stable because breaking changes are rare. Arch is unstable because breaking changes are common. In my personal experience, arch has been very reliable, because said breaking changes are manageable and unnecessary complexity is low.

    • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      that’s fair, and i think that in the context that we were both talking about, what we both wrote was reasonably correct

      arch is a reliable OS that is sometimes unstable

      but a server needs a stable OS to be reliable, which means that whilst arch can be a reliable OS, it does not make a particularly reliable server