Be fair, let’s not compare to Ubuntu, we all know it’s shit. The reason you don’t use arch on servers is because of bugs in new package versions and manual intervention requirements every once in a while, not because it breaks a lot. Try Debian on servers. It’s rock solid, even more so than arch.
Debian is currently on neovim version 0.4.4 (august 7, 2020). Arch is on 0.9.1(may 29, 2023) (current). That’s just an example off the top of my head.
If you use a server exclusively for serving content and never modify configs on your server… php current version is 7.4 (past EOL since Nov 2022)…
Oh wait, I’m only on Debian 11, though its supported until at least 2024. I have “support” but its for old versions of software. I sometimes can’t even share a tmux config between my desktop and my server, because the versions are so different.
I have had similar issues with debian dist-upgrades just like I have with ubuntu. Turns out jumping from neovim 0.4.4 to 0.9.1 (jk, debian sid STILL only has 0.7.2) is the kind of version jump that goes straight past a deprecation warning in 0.5 and actual deprecation in 0.6, and now my config doesn’t work. So the options are “always be perpetually just a bit out of date because we cant actually update to new software”, or “risk breaking things by having large version leaps, from the woefully outdated to the pretty new”
So the solution to needing newer server software versions: run things in docker… Which they package version 20.10 in the “docker.io” package. Uninstalling that, and reinstalling from the docker official source to get docker-ce gets us up to 24.0.5, which is the same version as arch. So it’s possible to get there, just not out of the box. And by the time you start adding ppa’s to your distro, things stop being as stable.
tl;dr - If you need up to date software, debian is awful. It is rock solid, but often obsolete.
I use it for my server with the docker workarounds, but needing to do workarounds make it less fun. If I had to start over, I might pick something else like NixOS. I dunno. For “not going to crash” levels of stability, I can’t explicitly name anything better, but for “actually functions how i want it to” it’s definitely not at the top.
For servers I’m actually a fan of FreeBSD. There’s a pretty good learning curve coming from Linux, but it’s about as stable as it gets, the documentation is probably the best, and I personally love the jails system.
Granted, everything I do is at the hobbyist level, but after messing with a number of OSs, I landed there after working with Green as and haven’t looked back.
Amen, freebsd is amazing for servers, with a little automation jails make docker and lxc look primitive, just wish there was a way to convert docker-compose to a jail instance.
Be fair, let’s not compare to Ubuntu, we all know it’s shit. The reason you don’t use arch on servers is because of bugs in new package versions and manual intervention requirements every once in a while, not because it breaks a lot. Try Debian on servers. It’s rock solid, even more so than arch.
Debian is currently on neovim version 0.4.4 (august 7, 2020). Arch is on 0.9.1(may 29, 2023) (current). That’s just an example off the top of my head.
If you use a server exclusively for serving content and never modify configs on your server… php current version is 7.4 (past EOL since Nov 2022)…
Oh wait, I’m only on Debian 11, though its supported until at least 2024. I have “support” but its for old versions of software. I sometimes can’t even share a tmux config between my desktop and my server, because the versions are so different.
I have had similar issues with debian dist-upgrades just like I have with ubuntu. Turns out jumping from neovim 0.4.4 to 0.9.1 (jk, debian sid STILL only has 0.7.2) is the kind of version jump that goes straight past a deprecation warning in 0.5 and actual deprecation in 0.6, and now my config doesn’t work. So the options are “always be perpetually just a bit out of date because we cant actually update to new software”, or “risk breaking things by having large version leaps, from the woefully outdated to the pretty new”
So the solution to needing newer server software versions: run things in docker… Which they package version 20.10 in the “docker.io” package. Uninstalling that, and reinstalling from the docker official source to get docker-ce gets us up to 24.0.5, which is the same version as arch. So it’s possible to get there, just not out of the box. And by the time you start adding ppa’s to your distro, things stop being as stable.
tl;dr - If you need up to date software, debian is awful. It is rock solid, but often obsolete.
I use it for my server with the docker workarounds, but needing to do workarounds make it less fun. If I had to start over, I might pick something else like NixOS. I dunno. For “not going to crash” levels of stability, I can’t explicitly name anything better, but for “actually functions how i want it to” it’s definitely not at the top.
For servers I’m actually a fan of FreeBSD. There’s a pretty good learning curve coming from Linux, but it’s about as stable as it gets, the documentation is probably the best, and I personally love the jails system.
Granted, everything I do is at the hobbyist level, but after messing with a number of OSs, I landed there after working with Green as and haven’t looked back.
Amen, freebsd is amazing for servers, with a little automation jails make docker and lxc look primitive, just wish there was a way to convert docker-compose to a jail instance.