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.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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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.
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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.
For all my non-compliant, non-supported hosts I started using Fedora CoreOS quite successfully.
If you package your applications as containers, you should have a very easy time with it. It's based off ostree, which means a couple of things:
- immutable (so not easy to break, I guess?)
- atomic upgrades, which means you upgrade in a single step
- atomic and full rollbacks, which means if an upgrade breaks your host, you can rollback to the exact previous version booted simply by choosing it from grub
- still based on rpm, so you will still have a grasp of it, even though many things are completely different
- other benefits I forgot, I'm sure :)
All with the added benefit that once you go towards containers you can change your distro with minimal effort, so there's that.
This question is just going to draw a lot of "hey what's your favourite distro" responses.
But if you want something EL-like that isn't RHEL, consider the bastard child of Conectiva and Mandrake, long ejected from the RedHat family but still very similar -- PCLinuxOS. It has the superior signed packaging format, and it has much of the same workflow. Its packer compatibility suffers greatly from its mageia times - I think - so they're still a bit ghetto about anything at scale, but that's almost the only thing they don't have nailed-down. Their massive compatibility window delivers on everything AppStream claims but cannot.
For minimal stuff, consider AlpineLinux, which also is free of Systemd and still manages to run really well for reasons Lennart's fans simply can't understand.
Personal and general purpose: KDE Neon (yeah yeah)
Servers: IDK, now. Probably going to check out SUSE.
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Debian's pretty good, but you can always use RHEL with a free account too
Devuan over Debian for stability and speed.