Edit: wow, this is a never ending comment section!
Debian
NixOS
how is nix better than debian for servers?
Declarative configuration of services and the rest of the entire system, and everything that brings with it.
- Want to test some new service, or make changes to an existing one, but don’t know if you want to keep it? Sure, just temporarily switch to the new configuration, you can always switch back to the old one and everything will be back as it was.
- Have multiple servers and want to share configuration between them? Absolutely, just import the same file from both. I have a git repo storing configurations for 10 machines and a huge part of it is shared configuration.
- Want to use one service’s endpoint (such as a socket path) in another? Sure, just use the socket path configuration option for the first service in the configuration for the second, such as here. This works since everything is a single tree of options which all the service configuration files are then generated from, so interpolate stuff as you wish.
- Checks for configuration correctness during build of the system (NixOS options are type checked during evaluation, and then during the actual system build there’s more checks, like nginx config has to succeed
nginx -t
, otherwise the system build fails and you can’t switch to it) - Want to spin up a VM to test changes before putting it on the actual target? There’s a builtin command (nixos-rebuild build-vm) that makes a script that starts a QEMU VM with your configuration running in it. It’s as fast as building the real system, so a couple seconds if you’re making small changes.
- Setting up services is also often as easy as putting
services.foo.enable = true;
in your configuration. And, if you remove that line, the service is gone, so you’re never left with “the random package or file you installed once to test something and has been forgotten about”. That’s the biggest thing it has over any kind of imperative solution IMO.
I feel like even if I want to distro hop again and end up putting something else on my desktop, NixOS is going to stay on my servers indefinitely. It’s pretty much a perfect fit for servers.
It isn’t, it’s just different. I use NixOS because of stupid easy rollbacks, which is great for experimenting in production, and its declarative nature, which is great in a server setting.
I just heard of NixOS for the first time because of this thread. Looked up some videos on it, and my jaw hit the fucking floor.
I really liked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y - step by step, with examples and great explanations. Warning: it’s long, but I watched it in one session.
Unraid
same
Proxmox (debian) on the hosts, and Debian for all the VMs and Containers.
Just nice and easy to use, supported by basically everything, and a minimal install uses like 30MB of RAM.
I also have an OSX VM because that’s literally the only way you can test a website in Safari (fu Apple).
You don’t need Safari unless it’s for Apple Pay integration or something. WebKit is open source. Use Epiphany or some other browser that uses it.
Love proxmox. Been using it for nearly a decade and while it has its pain points it has been rock solid for me for the past 4 years.
when vendors pull this kind of crap ill simply not test on their software.
It’s more that like 60% of my web traffic is Safari so I want to make sure it works for those people.
thats unexpected, what are you doing thats being used by a majority of apple users?
Proxmox for the the hosts, Debian cloud imagen for the VMs and docker inside
Synology DiskStation Manager.
ArchlinuxARM, however it does not matter, given that everything I actually run, runs within Docker
Proxmox w/Debian, TrueNAS Scale, and Home Assistant VMs w/(usually Alpine) Docker containers in some VMs
I use Proxmox, running a mix of regular and NixOS based LXCs. One of those also runs Docker for simpler services.
Currently I am using Arch Linux. I am in the process of switching to NixOS.
Depends on what you want to do with it. But for most things Debian or Fedora (Server edition) work fine.
i hear bad things about it, how does fedora server compare to debian?
It’s much more up to date and in my experience works fine.
TrueNAS Core as main OS and a few jails for the services I run on the machine.
Ubuntu LTS, with all my services in Docker containers.
I know Ubuntu gets a lot of (deserved) hate for some of the shit Canonical pulls, but for now, I like Ubuntu and it works for me.
When I rebuilt my server at the beginning of the month, I was gonna jump to Debian, but my god the Debian website is obtuse. After looking at the site and trying to determine what to download to get Debian with non-free (I’m unfortunately working with an NVIDIA card), I decided to go with Ubuntu. I needed a smooth rebuild process and with Ubuntu I know exactly what I’ll get when I download the LTS server.
Edit: grammar
arch + docker for the services
Debian + Docker.