Rhel if you are using professionally. Their enterprise support staff are wizards when it comes to finding the cause of random issues.
this post was submitted on 07 May 2026
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Debian or Fedora
I'd go with Debian but it's just a personal preference. I had some difficult to set up a samba server the other day in one of my laptops that was running fedora because of firewall configs that I don't use in Debian like adding context or something. Besides that, I kinda think dnf is better than apt in some ways but still use Debian on my home server. I just works
Hannah Montana Linux
I would use Ubuntu LTS (free) or Redhat Enterprise Linux. If paying is not an option, some RHEL derivate would probably also work.
Care to elaborate how Ubuntu failed newest release?
debian, but i prefer devuan personally
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
My first choice would still be Ubuntu, however if you don't like them RHEL is available for free for homelab's by jumping through some hoops.
Might also take a look at NixOS. Been running it for a while with no issues.
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.
Professional as in an organisation? You should probably start by gathering functional and non-functional requirements from stakeholders.
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.
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.
Alpine.
Debian & Alma of course!
Can't say anything for professional use, but debian is rock solid, always a strong choice for servers.
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.
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
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.
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.
If you are choosing between Fedora and Debian, definitely go with Debian. Fedora evolves too rapidly for professional use, and its administration requires excessive effort.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...