Ubuntu deviates from accepted standards too often (Mir, Upstart, Snap) thanks to Canonicals ham fisted attempts to redefine Linux.
Arch has a tendency to break due to the maintainers commitment to staying true to upstream. Too often you end up on the Arch wiki looking up how to solve small issues that should have been in the original PKGBUILD
Gentoo, not everyone wants to compile everything from source
Debian’s commitment to FOSS results in frequent incompatibilities (both SW and HW) out of the box.
Fedora is the perfect middle ground. It implements the latest technology standards as soon as they are stable (eg, Wayland, Btrfs by default), stays fairly close and true to upstream while maintaining package stability, and overall just works with a large variety of lackages
Fedora is for people who use Linux as a tool rather than a hobby.
Should I use Fedora for a home server? I like stuff not breaking randomly after updates which makes Gentoo and Arch kind of a meh choice. Debian is so committed to foss that it’s harder to get drivers working/a lot less stuff works out of the box. On a new enough laptop with all it’s weird chipset drivers, it’s harder to get Debian working than Arch in my experience. I’ve never successfully got Nvidia drivers working on Debian for example.
Normally home servers run bog standard older hardware so using Debian isn’t a problem but I want to install an Nvidia card for ai stuff.
If Debian works on your hardware and you just want something that works and doesn’t give you issues then yes its a good choice. It will just work happily in the background for years.
Fedora Server is a great choice if its something you want to continuously tinker with. Each release averages a little over 1 year of support so you’ll want to do a dist upgrade after each new version comes out.
I’m currently considering switching to it on a couple of production servers I manage because they rely on PostGIS. EL9 and Debian rely on the official postgres repositories rather than shipping their own .deb/rpms and the official postgres repository’s GIS packages are so unreliable I think it would be more stable on Arch. With Fedora server however I can just install postgres and postgis from the official community repo.
If you Emerge, Gentoo would at very least tell you before you install something that it’ll break as a result of dependency issues with a list of said dependencies, and offer to update those dependencies for you.
I got screwed one time really hard with emerge. I didn’t update for a long time and it was messed up enough that I couldn’t install anything due to python issues and I also couldn’t update due to python issues and there were circular dependencies. Experienced people on the Gentoo discord tried and failed to help me get that fixed without an os reinstall but all efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.
This was on a slow as molasses Athlon XP so reinstalling Gentoo was completely out of the question. Since Gentoo was basically the only thing that would run on that cpu, I got a different motherboard from ebay instead.
Fedora is for people who use Linux as a tool rather than a hobby.
Last I heard, this mere tool now no longer supports various video codecs lol. Something something “patents”, which get in the way of using something as a tool.
That doesn’t make any sense right? Most of them just works at least as well as Fedora.
Ubuntu deviates from accepted standards too often (Mir, Upstart, Snap) thanks to Canonicals ham fisted attempts to redefine Linux.
Arch has a tendency to break due to the maintainers commitment to staying true to upstream. Too often you end up on the Arch wiki looking up how to solve small issues that should have been in the original PKGBUILD
Gentoo, not everyone wants to compile everything from source
Debian’s commitment to FOSS results in frequent incompatibilities (both SW and HW) out of the box.
Fedora is the perfect middle ground. It implements the latest technology standards as soon as they are stable (eg, Wayland, Btrfs by default), stays fairly close and true to upstream while maintaining package stability, and overall just works with a large variety of lackages
Fedora is for people who use Linux as a tool rather than a hobby.
Should I use Fedora for a home server? I like stuff not breaking randomly after updates which makes Gentoo and Arch kind of a meh choice. Debian is so committed to foss that it’s harder to get drivers working/a lot less stuff works out of the box. On a new enough laptop with all it’s weird chipset drivers, it’s harder to get Debian working than Arch in my experience. I’ve never successfully got Nvidia drivers working on Debian for example.
Normally home servers run bog standard older hardware so using Debian isn’t a problem but I want to install an Nvidia card for ai stuff.
I run Proxmox which is based on Debian, no issues for over a year now!
If Debian works on your hardware and you just want something that works and doesn’t give you issues then yes its a good choice. It will just work happily in the background for years.
Fedora Server is a great choice if its something you want to continuously tinker with. Each release averages a little over 1 year of support so you’ll want to do a dist upgrade after each new version comes out.
I’m currently considering switching to it on a couple of production servers I manage because they rely on PostGIS. EL9 and Debian rely on the official postgres repositories rather than shipping their own .deb/rpms and the official postgres repository’s GIS packages are so unreliable I think it would be more stable on Arch. With Fedora server however I can just install postgres and postgis from the official community repo.
If you Emerge, Gentoo would at very least tell you before you install something that it’ll break as a result of dependency issues with a list of said dependencies, and offer to update those dependencies for you.
Portage really is an incredible package manager.
I got screwed one time really hard with emerge. I didn’t update for a long time and it was messed up enough that I couldn’t install anything due to python issues and I also couldn’t update due to python issues and there were circular dependencies. Experienced people on the Gentoo discord tried and failed to help me get that fixed without an os reinstall but all efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.
This was on a slow as molasses Athlon XP so reinstalling Gentoo was completely out of the question. Since Gentoo was basically the only thing that would run on that cpu, I got a different motherboard from ebay instead.
ye, I’ve tried Fedora before, it is nice distro
Last I heard, this mere tool now no longer supports various video codecs lol. Something something “patents”, which get in the way of using something as a tool.