ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
50% Positive
Analyzed from 661 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#ubuntu#linux#probably#more#free#used#years#debian#why#server
Discussion (12 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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?
RHEL is definitely the most stable major distribution. Alma and Rocky are essentially downstream clones of RHEL.
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.
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.
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.
Note, I did try Artix, but when it broke last week after a restart (in which evidently something had gone wrong with an earlier kernel update), and I had to pull out a rescue ISO, I decided I didn't want to mess with that. I switched that machine to Devuan, but the jury is still out for me. I don't have any major complaints, but I'm still in the burn-in phase. :) I'm running Arch on a laptop, but they have been a bit hostile in the community with censorship, so I'm just waiting for a free weekend to blast it and put something else on. I don't want political drama in my software.
This all comes at an interesting time, though. This is the first time that I purchased a new laptop and didn't even let it boot into Windows, but instantly installed Linux. And everything "just worked". And now that I'm excited to try Linux, so many of the big players are embracing the steps to erode privacy (AI everywhere... age attestation/verification... telemetry on by default...). It's sad, and I'm just going to "nope" out of any interactions with 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.
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