New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
Alm.. Debian!
But if we’re talking VERY small, might wanna look into Alpine etc
Where are you drawing the line between low and VERY low?
Very subjective question. I'd personally use Devuan (or Debian itself if systemd is actually wanted/preferred - not exactly minimalist but oh well...), which would likely be the most mainstream choice but you won't go wrong with *BSD either. Alpine and Void are probably also worth a look. In the end a lot of it depends on what you feel comfortable using.
Depends on what you need to run.
I’m unsure how small Debian can get.
However, if you have 512 MB RAM or less, and need as much RAM as possible for your application, it could be worth looking at Alpine.
I only use it when using an official Docker image of some software that they choose to pack with Alpine by default. Otherwise, I use Debian, even for each container.
i've used debian ever since, never managed to get started with all of those rpm based distros... dunno why...
Yeah, Debian really used to be the universal Linux. When they caved in (aka the controversial vote and all that...) to systemd (thank you Redhat for being a corporate lobby machine, thank you Lennart for being an eternal tool, ... as if all those shitty *kits and the PulseAudio debacle hadn't been enough) it drove me away though. First towards Devuan (kind of obvious) but lately that is becoming more and more infested (no, i don't want/need a daemon to manage my sessions... and i'd bet money that if one were to look there's probably some kind of trail leading to Redhat once again) too, so i've started to look for greener pastures.
Please
ELI5-- why RockyLinux has less attention here (for vps/hosting term) ?I don’t know much about that (got started with Linux probably about 10 years ago now, but at that point, I was 11..)
But I do know that my first OS was CentOS, and I think I recall most people on here talking about and using CentOS, I think that was why I choose to use it
Just funny because it’s totally shifted. Now, it’s almost rare to see someone using it on here
I have a vague memory of ’yum’ not working on Ubuntu, and googling to find out why
I don't trust AlmaLinux.
'benny Vasquez', always lowercase, was first installed at cPanel when they got purchased by a VC, changed licensing options, and brought us the $15 license for one site. She was there explaining the reasoning, and also ignoring the requests for bug fixes instead of forced new unwanted features. That was the beginning of the end.
Late 2021 AlmaLinux was created as a 'free' OS by the creators of CloudLinux.
Around the time AlmaLinux came out, guess who's now there and left cPanel suddenly and joined Alma's new organization?
benny Vasquez! Between this co-indcidence It seems like AlmaLinux is there so cPanel can have a free OS behind it, while not calling it cPanelOS, and very much reminding you CloudLinux has LVE and more! I don't see it as the philanthropic project it's calling itself, rather it's an OS you can run free with cPanel, since you're already forking over so much cash.
Don't forget, anytime you use the web UI or run upgrade scripts, you'll get a reminder & nudge to upgrade to AlmaLinux or CloudLinux.
I run Rocky 8 & Rocky 9 where possible. RIP cPanel.
Depends on CPU and memory. Debian 11 gets moderately well with 384 MB RAM and a CPU of at least 600 MHz; but Debian 12, due to changes in the kernel, you can't reasonably get by under 512 MB RAM (768 MB strongly preferred) and 800-1000 MHz for it. Ubuntu doesn't even let you go under 1GB RAM, at least on 23.10.
If you have anything below this you absolutely need to get rid of systemd and choose something that has for example init.d or sysvinit - systemd simply does not work below those specs, gives a kernel panic.
Devuan, antiX, are good options. I have more experience with the second one - can get hectic, but as with all things Debian, nothing an extra repo can't solve.
Under 128-192 MB RAM you're currently better off either going CLI or choosing something absurdly minimal that can get a GUI, like FreeBSD or, even smaller, NetBSD. You'll install firstly via CLI and then insert some kind of DE/Window manager like Enlightenment, Openbox or, if you feel absolutely magnananimous, LXDE. At those RAM spaces you could go like 300 MHz and it would still fly.
I was rehearsing with AlmaLinux 9.3, then with 8.8, but ultimately didn't like them and GNOME - I'm an apt guy, a firm XFCE advocate, and I couldn't carry on like that. Had to install Debian 12, I was getting too uncomfortable.
It's a shitshow they have going on at the RPM side of things. They are focusing on ABI and 1:1 but the second Red Hat nukes CentOS Stream (due to unpopularity or sheer strategy, or both - and that has a high probability) what are they gonna do? Base themselves off Fedora? A distro so unstable I never got to have it over 2 weeks in a row on any of my PCs without breaking stupidly?
SUSE can do something. Oracle can, as well. Those are big companies, they make money off support and licenses, might as well have some kind of sublicensing from Red Hat. Distros like AlmaLinux, Rocky and their counterparts... not so much. Although I'll hand it, Rocky's model seems the closest one to "salvation".
I think they didn't understand the message Red Hat conveyed when nuking CentOS like we've known it. I really think so. And since I'm building systems and I want to make them last, for me, but also the (eventual future) customers, I've sticked to Debian.
PS - I'm avoiding CPanel and (trying to avoid) Softaculous as well.
Yeah I started testing both Alma and Rocky, despite the worry of it being a free cPanel OS essentially, but when they decided to throw in the towel and announced they would stop being 1:1, when Rocky dug in that's when I was out.
Not going to learn a niche weird OS that really just exists as a free OS to cPanel until they upsell you to CloudLinux. I'd rather fund Rocky and any possible legal battle they have.
Probably going to start going Ubuntu, but starting with cPanel in 2001 before Red Hat was even enterprise, old habits die hard.
@Kris that capitalization, ”benny Vasquez”, just screams ”please notice that I capitalized my name incorrectly and point it out so that I can explain that it’s my STYLE!!!”
I try to avoid anything related to RedHat after what they did to Centos 8.
Gradually moving to Proxmox (Debian) with Docker.
Moving to Temple OS
Docker is one of those things that I delayed learning for too long. Makes life that much easier.
Is there any reason to avoid the BSD OS, in the first place, even if you have better hardware and resources? I've seen people who prefer FreeBSD, regardless.
Using Debian and Ubuntu. I killed my last CentOS VM years ago. And for some projects I enjoy using Fedora (mainly liquidsoap encoding).
I thought it was a mistake when the cPanel forum people created her to come in and reign hell with terrible organizational ideas and disregarding users, but no... you're 100% right that's.. apparently a style.
One I recognized while reading the AlmaLinux 'organization' about. Did not bode well. Soon after she announced they wouldn't maintain 1:1. I have a feeling whatever works well with cPanel will be chosen and given priority to.
Meanwhile Rocky Project said RHEL can't pull this crap due to licensing. They'd just provision new VMs at providers and use automated tools to get the latest source. That's the type of OS I want.
Not one that throws in the towel and has some quasi-weird environment going on that @alfatarsos had to unfortunately deal with.
’benny’ WANTED you to notice
In what way did Docker make things easier for you?
Well, Redhat has always been on the enterprisy side of things so choosing CentOS if you wanted to run something serious but didn't want to fork over money made perfect sense. Sure the enterprisy approach often conflicted with the hacker idiology of some users but oh well you didn't have to use anything Redhat after all. No big deal. Well, until Redhat started exporting it's technology.
Story time...
Which is kind of an unfair depiction at first i admit - it was really Ubuntu's massive popularity and Cannonical's bloat fetish that pushed the back then completely broken (aka standard Poettering-ware sponsored by Redhat) Pulseaudio into the mainstream (at that time fixing sound usually for a large part came down to
apt-get purge pulseaudio). It's a fitting example of Redhat-ization though. Until not to long ago i was still running pure ALSA (there is actually little to no real advantage in running Pulseaudio on top of it, even if it isn't a stinking pile of garbage anymore - read: no longer maintained by Poettering) but by now there is simply to many applications, which either let their ALSA support rot away or just dropped it - it's still the base to Pulseaudio and available pretty much everywhere but you won't get to use it anymore.Now the Pulseaudio drama could still be somewhat shrugged off but then came all the other shit that creeped it's way up to become mandatory for no good reason. The completely anti-unixy *kits, dbus, ... and to top it off systemd (like a lot of this shit again engineered by Lennart fucking Poettering...). Systemd is practically the answer to a Redhat-only problem: Linux systems being not uniform enough to cater to big business. So they told Lennart to build something that would make all Linux systems mostly the same and Lennart being Lennart started churning out shit with the slim excuse of building a new init system (a total joke... there were already a ton of modern and capable init systems to use if one felt dissatisfied by SysV).
Cannonical obviously hopped the bandwagon early (because new!, shiny! and them never skipping on an opportunity to implement some shit that feels like Windows...) and i felt sorry for all the folks having to use this abomination with all it's predictable (Lennart...) brokeness as Debian would never switch to something like that, would it? Well, turns out it would. Along came the big vote around Jessy and from what it looks like a lot of lobbying/interference from the side of Redhat as if Debian (being the second most important Linux distribution) would reject systemd all their dreams of making Linux into a generic, Windows-like shitfest would be over but in the end they succeeded. With Debian out of the way Lennart could finally start full on scope creeping, assimilating more and more historically independent services, enforce dumb Lennart rules for nothing but dumb Lennart reasons, deprecate fallbacks and push for tighter and tighter integration with just about everything.
And this, kids, was the story of how mainstream Linux came to suck so much these days, why Redhat is big poopy-pants and why Lennart Poettering writing software should be declared a crime against humanity.
Well, while it depends on situation and view point there are about 1.75 major cons (as far as generalizing *BSD works - there's also quite some variation between the different flavors), which might or might not be relevant:
I use Rocky Linux for some things that still might need RPM otherwise Debian
Windows NT4 FTW - Always!
@totally_not_banned thanks for that explaination. I’ll have to dig a lot deeper to truly get it though. Everything that I do where I really am aware that I use systemd is when I configure networking with systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved.
My application is very portable. Sadly, I don’t store all data on containers. I need persistant volume. But I’ve got maybe 6 volumes in total. Those are all that I need to back up to be able to provision to any server in minutes.
Also, there’s the official images for almost all software. My project needs MariaDB? Add the mariadb image to docker compose, and done.
I have a CI pipeline for all apps that when I push to github, Cloudflare builds frontends and deploys, and Docker Hub builds the docker images.
Updating the backend is a simple ./prod.sh or ./stage.sh that pulls from Docker Hub.
Any custom backups (like MariaDB backups) are handeled by a container running backup jobs and pushing to B2 every hour. It’s all containerized. It easily do this without the DB being accessable from outside localhost thanks to docker compose and its default network. I just use the service name to connect.
Big fan.
Sadly, I just realized that I actually am using Ubuntu in production.
It was the easiest and fastest OS to use to set up a good stack for optimal WP performance & caching thanks to RunCloud.io.
I would have wished that they focused on releasing a Debian version instead of offering two stacks: One with Docker and one without.
I don’t even use the Docker one. I use Docker only for making life easier for me. If I pay for a system that handles most of the server management automatically, there’s no longer any point in using Docker IMO.
@davide – don’t judge.
I switching to "debian thx" for my DA server after hearing EOL announcement years ago, never have issue so far.
I little bit clueless benefit bout RHEL-distro (out of "stability" and 1:1 binary stuff) which debian have same feature.
All have been changed to Debian 12/Ubuntu22.04 (for dev) and AlmaLinux 8 (for idling).