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Analyzed from 459 words in the discussion.

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#ubuntu#more#probably#debian#server#used#years#why#memory#free

Discussion (4 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

rob•29 minutes ago
I've switched to Debian (and since Ubuntu) for my server needs but I remember being obsessed in the mid 2000s with FreeBSD when I was younger. I would spend more time configuring and setting them up than doing anything actually useful on them.

It used to be hard to find dedicated servers or VPSs with any of the BSDs, I think I settled on Panix.com or something?

Before that I remember some company called 15MinuteServers (NAC?) out of NJ I think that offered them. Just kind of rambling down memory lane at this point though.

andix•42 minutes 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?

pm2222•6 minutes ago
Use a rolling release like Arch and it’s supported forever.
secabeen•17 minutes ago
Alma 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.

KennyBlanken•30 minutes ago
Probably 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.

nightfly•12 minutes 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.

andix•22 minutes 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.

lnenad•about 1 hour ago
I love people that aren't afraid to experiment and learn. As someone that hasn't had a formal education in software engineering (just in other kind of engineering) I learned the most by doing and failing.
LoganDark•about 1 hour ago
> I don’t know why fastfetch always report more memory being used than the actual values. I’ve never seen more than 3GiB used in btop for this server

My guess would be that fastfetch probably reports actual memory usage while btop probably reports the total usage of all processes. The former is probably higher because of things like filesystem caching