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Slightly off topic: What's currently the free Linux distribution with the longest support cycle? For a while I used CentOS 7 on all of those small VMs, because
by andix 5mo ago
Slightly off topic: What's currently the free Linux distribution with the longest support cycle?
For a while I used CentOS 7 on all of those small VMs, because it got security updates for a really long time. With minimal risk of breaking things on updates.
PS: after a bit of research Alma/Rocky Linux are probably the best choices for now. 10 years of support. But are they maintained well?
- KennyBlanken 5mo agoProbably Debian or Ubuntu. The question is...why do you care that much? I've upgraded Debian stable (both pure and with some cherry-picked backports) and Ubuntu (non-LTS and LTS) systems in place and rarely broken anything, for years and years. When stuff has broken it's been a quick google and then slapping myself for not having read the upgrade guide. I do generally wait about 2-3 weeks before upgrading, giving time for them to catch stuff that was missed until the great masses were set loose on it.
- andix 5mo ago> why do you care that much? I've had issues with Ubuntu/Debian upgrades more than once. Some third party binaries breaking with the update. Or some specific config tweaks that break, because the structure of /etc changed too much. For some small VM with a specific purpose I prefer a distribution that changes as little as possible for as long as possible. Less work, more uptime.
- irishcoffee 5mo agoI won't touch ubuntu unless forced to by some obscure work requirement. I've had enough bad experiences with repos being shut down, updates/upgrades breaking unanticipated, obscure things, and I hate snap. The naming conventions drive me crazy as well. When you deal with 2 things that have dumbshit naming conventions, like ubuntu and ROS, its really obnoxious to pretend to case enough to keep track of.
- nightfly 5mo ago> The question is...why do you care that much? Not the OP, but I support Ubuntu as desktop and server OS for an engineering collage and have for 10ish years. Some LTS upgrades don't require many changes (mostly minor package name changes) and some take months of work to get rolled out (mostly for workstations, the server upgrades are usually quick.). Not everything gets upgraded every new OS release. If we had to upgrade everything every 6-12 months it would eat up a significant amount of time for our small team.
- otherme123 5mo agoI have a machine that has been Fedora since twenty-something to current 44, and upgrading yearly is a breeze. Three commands, and just wait for a download and the reboot. The only thing that breaks if you forget that the upgrade needs attention is the system Postgres, until I migrated to Podman images.
- HDBaseT 5mo agoI recently upgraded to Fedora 44 from Fedora 43 and I wouldn't say its a breeze, it can be difficult, especially if you've enabled extra repos. If you use Copr (Nvidia Drivers, Non-Free Stuff) you need to ensure all your Copr packages work fine in the next version of Fedora. A ton of packages haven't been updated for Fedora 44 and this will cause issues. The same applies if you use Terra
- kuekacang 5mo agoOnly using ubuntu rn, but when the server is mostly running docker, it is simpler upgrade nowadays with so little dependencies. But then the problem just moved to the container image updates.
- secondcoming 5mo agoI had unattended-upgrades cripple our VMs
- Enginerrrd 5mo agoIve had nothing but issues doing that. I think I’ve had a Debian upgrade actually succeed maybe one time? (After some manual intervention to fix some issue other booting on my work server) For updates, Debian and Ubuntu are great. For upgrades… not so much for me.
- secabeen 5mo agoAlma and Rocky if you want fully free or have a lot of machines. RHEL if you are okay with registering with them; they give ten machines free access to their updates for each Registered account in their system. RHEL is definitely the most stable major distribution. Alma and Rocky are essentially downstream clones of RHEL.
- pm2222 5mo agoUse a rolling release like Arch and it’s supported forever.
- andix 5mo agoI need to enable automatic updates, because I don't have the time to manually update. I have a few machines on Open SuSE Tubleweed, and stuff just randomly breaks. A few months ago there was a weird Kernel bug that just froze all of them. They update and reboot every day, and suddenly it all worked well again. A bit too exciting for me :)
- delicious_apple 5mo agoYou can always try openSUSE Slowroll (in beta), which is a rolling release that updates less frequently than Tumbleweed. It advertises better stability. https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Slowroll https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Slowroll
- wolvoleo 5mo agoBut then you have constant maintenance. I prefer rolling distros, don't get me wrong. But it does mean you will get the latest of every package constantly and some cause problems. For a box that sits in a corner doing its joband you don't want to pay attention to it's not a good choice IMO. On a desktop you want the latest of everything on and you have time to keep up it's the best.
- computerfriend 5mo agoI have an Arch server that has been online for ten years (yikes), never had any issues with it.
- TylerE 5mo ago> never had any issues with it. You've never NOTICED any issues. Which is far from the same claim...
- mhitza 5mo ago> But are they maintained well? Alma has a few affordances as it's no longer RHEL source compatible, which means it could ship priviledge escalation fixes with new kernel updates faster. Rocky responded with an extra, optional to enable, security repo to provide mitigations to the exploits while waiting for RHEL to downstream. Look pretty well maintained to me. If only judging by recent events.
- gh02t 5mo agoRocky's docs are also really nice. They aren't as thorough as RedHat's, but they're much more readable and concise, and tend to be written for a less enterprise-y audience.
- mhitza 5mo agoDon't even remind me about the RedHat docs, lol. Their solutions pages used to be readable with an account, now I think you need a subscription too. The manuals, indeed are good, though for more esoteric issues I land too often on a gated answer page.
- doubled112 5mo agoYou can use the free developer subscription for documentation even if you don't plan to use your 16 RHEL licenses.
- infinet 5mo agoContent wise the RedHat docs are great, but navigating the doc has a wired feeling that is hard to describe. Everything is black and white, the page has low information density perhaps because of the line space or paragraph space; the typesetting of command line and configure examples is not clear separated from surrounding text; mouse cannot select text of the command line examples; the page top is distracting because it keeps showing and disappearing as mouse scrolls up and down. Somehow the left navigation pane is also difficult to follow, easy to get lost when trying to find a section.
- andix 5mo ago
- BadBadJellyBean 5mo agoYou are betting that whatever you host doesn't live as long as the upgrade cycle because it'll probably be a pain when the upgrades finally arrive. I'd rather have smaller version jumps more often than a huge jump with everything changing after a long time.
- andix 5mo agoIt usually doesn't live until the end of the support cycle. And if it does I will probably migrate it to a fresh VM instead of upgrading the distribution.
- 6031769 5mo agoCompletely agree. A fresh install beats an in-place major version upgrade every time. Less hazardous and gives an easy path to clear out all the accumulated crud.
- BadBadJellyBean 5mo agoI'm not worried about upgrading. I'm worried about the whole environment being potentially several versions newer than the old one. All shared libraries. All services. Everything new. And now you have to make a software that has had little upgrades run on that. Have fun.
- tannhaeuser 5mo agoDebian LTS/extended LTS
- andix 5mo ago5 years is not a lot. It releases every 2 years, so it requires upgrading at least every 4 years. In the worst case it's just 3 years of support, if you install right before the next release. ELTS is 10 years and paid. It's great that it exists, but not relevant for my toy projects.
- WJW 5mo agoSo there is a project that you care enough about to keep it alive, but 1-2 hours every FOUR YEARS is too much? At some point I just have to call you lazy dude. Either the 1-2 hours is a drop in the bucket compared to what you spend on it anyway (like a blog you still regularly update), or you don't actively update the project but still care enough about it to spend half an evening every few years, or you should just admit you don't care about it enough anymore to do even that. In the last case just delete the project.
- andix 5mo agoYes, I'm lazy. And that's fine.
- cocoto 5mo agoIt can be way more than 2 hours depending on the project.
- com2kid 5mo ago> So there is a project that you care enough about to keep it alive, but 1-2 hours every FOUR YEARS is too much? At some point I just have to call you lazy dude. I want the machine that serves my static blog pages to have, ideally, 0 maintenance. It needs to do one thing, serve some static HTTP pages and have new pages pushed to it. Quite frankly I wish some of those "minimal docker first OSs" had taken off.
- nextos 5mo agoI would say NixOS, where it is trivial to switch across releases, run software from different releases, and perform rollbacks. I have been running NixOS on several servers for more than a decade. No reinstalling, upgrading, or any breaks whatsoever.
- indemnity 5mo agoI run nixOS as well on my home infrastructure (gateway/firewall, a couple of internal servers). But I have had, uh, non-trivial breakages happen also when I upgrade the system itself to the next yearly release. Non-bootable kernel kind of breakages. But I will give you that I can just boot from the generation before the upgrade, and it works again. So there's that :)
- tombert 5mo agoI've only been running NixOS (in any serious capacity) for three years, but I have installed it on every computer that I am allowed to install it on now. It has been the most headache-free Linux I've used, simply because I'm less scared to play with and fix stuff. The fact that rollbacks are trivial and snapshots are automatic, and since everything is declarative in a text file anyway, I am way braver. If I do something like screw up the video driver, or the wifi driver or make it so the system doesn't boot anymore, all I need to do is reboot and choose a previous generation.
- andix 5mo ago> simply because I'm less scared to play with and fix stuff. The main reason of a LTS distribution is not having to play around and fix stuff. Install something once, and it keeps running without any changes, but still gets security updates.
- tombert 5mo agoYeah, but I find that particularly with laptops, even with LTS releases, there's almost always something you need to fix. For example, there's a weird quirk with my laptop that if I am using a USB keyboard and stop typing for more than a minute, it "powers down", and if when I start typing again it misses the first four or five characters, which is very annoying. The solution involved putting a few boot parameters and then it works fine and as expected, but I would be reluctant to do that with Ubuntu or really any non-NixOS distro, because if I screw up a boot param I get into a situation where the computer won't, you know, boot, meaning I'm stuck screwing around with grub commands and trying to fix things, which is annoying. With NixOS, if I screw things up it's like a minute of rebooting and choosing the old generation. Not to mention that if you have a non-declarative OS, it can be hard to know what exactly is on the computer. When I ran an Ubuntu LTS server, I eventually had installed dozens of packages that I don't think were being used but it was hard to know for sure which ones were necessary and which ones weren't. When I'm using NixOS all the packages are unambiguously in the configuration.nix. "Uninstalling" a program (including its transitive dependencies) is just removing that package out of the configuration.nix and rebuilding. I have nothing against LTS releases, but I do think that at least for laptops (which can have kind of arcane hardware quirks) it's better to use NixOS.
- ezst 5mo agoFor a while (a decade+), I was running CentOS on my servers on the same assumption of long time stability and ensuing peace of mind. Then I figured that over such durations, the ecosystem drift becomes significant and keeping applications up to date and running on top of the OS becomes an increasing challenge (with the more "infrastructure" packages like glibc, python/Apache combos, GCC, ... slowly becoming incompatible with the latest applicative stack). Then I figured that version upgrades were miserable, not just because I had painted myself in a weird corner with ungodly packages mix-ups, but because the upgrade path was always best-effort. I think I gave up during the 6 to 7 transition, as I realised that all I needed was fedora: with yearly or half-yearly updates I have no need to fight the distro's packages: stuff stays current and in working order, major distro upgrades go smoothly, downtime is minimal. I'm not considering going back to any "server distribution" ever.
- andix 5mo ago> slowly becoming incompatible with the latest applicative stack LTS distributions are great if your applications don't change (much), or are explicitly compatible with the specific distribution you run them on.
- pull_my_finger 5mo ago[dead]
- Tepix 5mo agoUbuntu Pro is free for up to 5 systems. 15 years.
- peanut-walrus 5mo agoI see no reason not to go with a rolling release distro for personal servers. Run all the services in containers and have the base OS auto-update itself as often as it needs. Went with openSUSE MicroOS myself, it updates and reboots almost daily so I can be pretty confident my server is healthy and it's atomic so if something does break and I don't feel like dealing with it, I can just click rollback button from cockpit and deal with it whenever I have time.
- exyi 5mo agoThen you also have to auto-update the containers, if it's a public facing service. Either you'll have to build containers yourself or hope the developer pushes a new update whenever the base image has relevant security fixes.
- peanut-walrus 5mo agoYup, podman quadlets autoupdate quite nicely. Setting up a local registry mirror with ~3d delay before applying updates is on my todo list. My own service images already have a script that runs daily that pulls latest git updates and builds fresh images.
- mx7zysuj4xew 5mo agoEverything you listed is the antithesis to managing and maintaining high availability systems
- peanut-walrus 5mo agoIt's your personal toy server, you are optimizing for something entirely different than high availability.
- andix 5mo agoI have around 20 "personal toy servers". I really don't like to fix them all the time. Most of them are some small VMs or some Rasperry Pis controlling something. I want minimal changes on those systems, but still being able to update them.
- AltruisticGapHN 5mo agoI mean Ubuntu Pro is free for personal use and it extends the LTS support of 5 years so a total of 10 years afaik.
- itomato 5mo agoI don't have data, but my guess would be Debian or Slackware