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?
What’s failed about their newest release ?
Mostly the uutils.
- MIT license isn’t nice.
- They have way more CVEs than the core utils they replace.
- They don’t have feature parity yet, so if you use some rare flags in your scripts, those will break.
Code rewrites are always going to have growing pains. Rewriting gnu-corrutils in rust is a noble effort.
Should have used agpl if they wanted to be noble.
It’s just a corpo moating strategy.
Dno, I don’t use Ubuntu. Just heard from all my Linux sources (podcasts, forums, etc) that their Newest release sucked.
LOL, you could hear that about pretty much every release of any software.
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.
It is going to run af .go application that is the backend for my website. Handling user logins, database translation etc.
Go applications are statically built. So you don’t really need anything special on the server for that. Anything will do. Debian would be fine here.
Which one has the biggest repositpry libruary off the bat? It’s a GUI-less server. So no browser downloading of .deb files anyways.
OpenMediaVault comes with a beginner friendly webui, and all programs from the debian repos are available. It’s plain debian under the hood. You can install docker, lxc, k8s and kvm plugins and they are managable from the webui.
Can’t say anything for professional use, but debian is rock solid, always a strong choice for servers.
Debian & Alma of course!
arch linux btw
My AI says I should always choose Debian 12 (last stabel) instead of 13 (latest build). Is this still a thing? Not hosting applications that needs to be reliably run on latest builds?
The current stable release is Debian 13. Choosing 12 is nonsense.
Debian is already noiriously lagging behind latest package versions (that’s how they make it so stable : they freeze all package versions when they release a new version of Debian, and only backport security fixes).
Either your AI was trained before Debian 13 came out, or it is giving you really bad advice. I can’t think of a single good reason to use an older Debian for a fresh install…
To find out the actual current latest stable, just check the site: https://www.debian.org/releases/
The stable distribution contains the latest officially released distribution of Debian.
This is the production release of Debian, the one which we primarily recommend using.
The current stable distribution of Debian is version 13, codenamed trixie. It was initially released as version 13.0 on August 9th, 2025 and its latest update, version 13.4, was released on March 14th, 2026.
Good to know! I am pretty sold on Debian.
Classic AI Garbage!
Debian 13 is stable and the latest stable you can get…
This page has options for downloading and installing Debian 13.4.0, the stable release.
Debian 13 download page, source of quote
I’m running on Debian Trixie since release last year with exactly zero issues, you can hardly get more stable than with Debian.
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.
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.
Professional Server grade distro, would probably be either Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or OpenSUSE Enterprise Linux.
For my personal homelab server I run Arch Linux, but I wouldn’t do it in an enterprise.
openSUSE is sadly not an option at scaleway. Otherwise it wasn’t a choice xD
how common is ubuntu on servers?
Much more common than is should be.
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.
interesting, i had no idea
People shit on it but there’s a lot of good open-source tooling that supports it.
There are nist l1 profiles
Tutorials and guides for everything
etc
Part of being a good sysadmin is knowing when not to reinvent the wheel. Ubuntu has a lot of options for vetted, hardened, “other people’s wheels.”
Also, for posterity, the competent ones are running the headless, server version of Ubuntu. (As opposed to the bloated mess that is Ubuntu Desktop). The server version catches a lot of flack it doesn’t deserve.
i didn’t shit on it, i am on kubuntu rn. i just never heard of it being a thing in the server world.
It is the biggest os server wise in the world. Everything on aws runs ubuntu as well. Any SaaS is ubuntu. You cannot get around it datacenter or SaaS wise.
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.
Debian would be the most obvious choice. Perhaps Alma is also a good option. If you would like a european option, OpenSUSE leap can also do the job.
I usually have Debian on all my servers for stability, and run almost everything inside containers for convenience. The few things that run directly in Debian are nginx for reverse proxying to container services, fail2ban+firewall, and wireguard for everything that moves data between servers/computers/devices I own
Professional as in an organisation? You should probably start by gathering functional and non-functional requirements from stakeholders.
It’s for running a .go app as a backend through an api to my website/app frontend.
Alpine.
