I am about to set up a cloud instance with linux operating system, and the common choice here normally would be ubuntu. But since they failed their newest release, and I have the option of going fedora or debian. What would you guys recommend for server?
Best fit is always dependent on how you're planning to use it. Find out what your requirements before you set up a server.
Generally Debian is chosen very often, but I'd wager pretty much any distro will do. Your own experience goes a long way in making a distro a good choice.
I personally favour Alpine Linux for its minimalism, but Devuan or Debian are fine, and more familiar choices, too. Depending on what you intend to run, especially appliance-like things, OpenBSD might be a good alternative.
If you are choosing between Fedora and Debian, definitely go with Debian. Fedora evolves too rapidly for professional use, and its administration requires excessive effort.
Depends on what you mean by professional and your needs.
Debian (stable) is rock solid but (because) slow changing, if your application is slow (or not) changing it's probably the better choice, but if you need new things before it's ready for a new version it'll be pain. It's the professional sysad's choice because they'll likely not have to do anything.
Fedora is faster moving (think cutting edge, not bleeding edge (e.g. Arch) as opposed to Debian's blunt safety) so if you're in active development it's likely a better choice. It is also sort of the testing arm for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is the quintessential professional Distro, so you'll learn some of that along the way.
I'd go with Debian but it's just a personal preference. I had some difficult to set up a samba server the other day in one of my laptops that was running fedora because of firewall configs that I don't use in Debian like adding context or something. Besides that, I kinda think dnf is better than apt in some ways but still use Debian on my home server. I just works
I've used rocky Linux on a couple of boxes and it's been very good to me though I've since rationalised everything to Debian for the sake of simplifying my setup.
Do yourself a favor and go with Nixos. Dive head first into to the rabbit hole and set up a repeatable and immutable system. You'll thank yourself later when so many maintenance tasks become a GitOps workflow: update config, commit, push, build, deploy, rollback if it fails
I think there are many right answers, and in the end it's dependent on your personal likings. I am self-hosting using Fedora, and I couldn't be happier.
yea, ubuntu 'failing' is news to me, too. their infrastructure has been hammered by bad actors, and pre-release daily spins were at-times a bit rocky, but the release itself (barring a few potential issues on the desktop with all the changes) seems to be solid.
Both Debian and RHEL-like distros are solid choices. Both are super stable. Debian tends to not always have the newest packages, so if you want that I'd steer away from Debian. Personally I use Rocky Linux for my servers. It's based on RHEL, meaning each new major version benefits from Red Hat's 10 years of software support. Debian (and derivates) have better community support I think, but RHEL has very solid documentation (which for the most part applies directly to Rocky, Alma etc.)
At my workplace 95% is running ubuntu. Those servers that doesn't, are running crappy Microsoft server, and those are just because the applications weren't yet running on linux, but everything does now, so I gues they will switch to ubuntu very shortly.
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