So I have been running a fair amount of selfhosted services over the last decade or so. I have always been running this on a Ubuntu LTS distribution running on a intel NUC machine. Most, if not all of my services run in a docker container, and using a docker compose file that brings everything up. The server is headless. I connect over ssh into a tmux config so I am always ready to go.

Ubuntu has been my stable server choice over the years. I’ve made the upgrade from 16, 18, 20 and 22 LTS release and everything has kept working. I even upgraded the hardware (old NUC to a new NUC) and just imaged the disk from the old one onto the new machine, and the server kept chugging along quite nicely, after I configured the hardware (specifically the Intel QuickSync for hardware transcoding in the Plex container).

Since Ubuntu has been transitioning from a really open community driven effort into a commercial enterprise, I feel it may be time to look at other distributions. On the other hand, it will require a fair amount of work to make the switch. But if it needs to be done, than so be it. I guess I am looking for opinions on what Linux distribution would fit my particular use case, and am wondering what most of us here are running.

TLDR; What stable, long term supported Linux distributions do you recommend for a headless server running a stack of docker containers?

  • @TCB13English
    1•10 months ago

    You know it isn’t true, ever since they started requiring a CLA.

    LXD is literally less free than proxmox, looking at those terms, since Canonical isn’t required to open source any custom lxd versions they host.

    LXD was forked into Incus (before the CLA took effect) and is now developed under the Linux Containers umbrella as Apache 2.0. From the link:

    Incus is a true open source community project, free of any CLA and remains released under the Apache 2.0 license. It’s maintained by the same team of developers that first created LXD.

    The only reason why I wrote LXD/Incus is because on Debian 12 you can get it from the repositories as LXD and the roadmap is to eventually replace it with Incus. Both the Debian maintainers and Incus team are working on this transition and have expressed their guarantee that whenever a Debian version comes out with the replacement it will upgrade automatically without incompatibilities or breaking changes - after all the current Debian version is before the CLA took place and is compatible with the Incus code.

    At this point, for anyone running Debian 12, you can’t say “go get Incus” as it will just cause confusion and require an extra repository. You’ve to say “go get LXD from the repository” and they’ll eventually get updated to Incus without breaking their setup later.

    Either way, still more free than Proxmox.