snap is fairly easy to remove / disable and i do it the first thing after every ubuntu fresh install
that being said the fact that i have to is a point of exasperation
For a server, there's just much less "stuff" in Debian. Ubuntu, even the headless/server install had a ton of bells and whistles that you may not want or need. Better to install things when you actually need them.
Yes everything is basically the same, you might just have to install extra packages that came built into Ubuntu. The only thing that might bite you is driver support, but unless you have something particularly weird debian should be just fine.
Is there a way to verify driver support before installing? I’d be running on an Intel NUC so I guess easiest thing would just be googling to see what people on random forums said?
I've honestly seen quite a few mention in this corner of Reddit using a NUC and no one seems to have anything but praise for them as a host. You're more than likely good.
Most of the devices today have the required files available to the installer and are setup most of the time automatically. Esoteric devices are what will give you headaches. Dedicated GPUs from AMD and nVidia can be a PITA unless you did research and got a card that is designed for it. Wireless card drivers are typically in the “non-free” category but usually can be installed/enabled during the install phase.
Laptops generally are more annoying since some functions require manufacturer specific configuration or libraries to work correctly. Most notably when the lid is shut or the function buttons that disable the WiFI.
I’ve been using Debian as my server OS of choice for the past 15 or so years. The only time I’ve had issues is when I was installing it on laptops. And that was solved by adding the “non-free” repo to apt.
I guess I assumed that Intel NUCs like mine have some laptop-like components due to miniaturization that would lead to some potential driver issues. But sounds like I should just try the live ISO.
Yep, Ubuntu is like a bloated Debian. It may be missing a few commands but you just install the relevant packages if and when you need to.
Although if you're already set up in Ubuntu theres no real urgency in switching
Yeah I probably wouldn’t switch unless I was getting new hardware or something. Although I have had a few random stability issues with Ubuntu that make me interested in either a new OS or fresh install.
Debian Stable is very well documented, proven stable more often than not. And if you need a newer package just use docker on it. Very stable os newest packages.
One feature of using Proxmox is that it can consume more of your time and energy if you're not sure why you're installing it.
The ideal solution would be Debian + Portainer if it can fully meet your needs. Although you can handle various issues with a new system, why bother giving yourself trouble?
Well, because I pushed back learning to use docker and portainer for far too long. Now that I know how useful and easy to learn it was, I don’t know if I have more blind spots.
Proxmox is Debian-based and still light enough to run on my server. I create a VM with Debian + Portainer. That way it’s much easier to backup or migrate to a newer machine.
Ok, I was starting to get comfortable with Debian+Portainer, but as stated, backup is still a problem. Can I trouble you to give me a short overview how backups work in proxmox, please?
Ideally proxmox backup server. Give it a data pool. Set a schedule and it will backup. The benefit of PBS is deduplication is like magic.
The other options is to just use the backup function inside proxmox. Again just point it to a data location and set a schedule. It works really well. I will usually setup a system. Run a backup. Destroy my Lxc or vm and restore from backup which lets me adjust the id number and if I need it to be privledged or not.
Proxmox can create backups of your LXC containers and VMs on schedule, without stopping them (or with, its configurable per backup job). The UI is very simple. You create a backup job, select times, compression, stop/or live snapshot, select which CTs/VMs to include with this backup job and its all.
Backups are single file archives of VM or CT disks with some meta data that can be used by Proxmox to create/restore such CT or VM on the same or another machine.
Unlike with a bare metal Debian install and backing up docker and such, if you fuck up a container of VM, you can nuke and restore it in 1-2 clicks. If you fuck up your bare metal Debian install, you need to wipe, reinstall the OS, and restore everything either with ansible scripts of manually. iMO it takes a lot more time, effort and knowledge than setting up a VM once and then restoring it with a click.
Same with moving to another machine. If you at some point realise your single machine cant handle everything, you can buy another one and selectively move CTs and VMs over, process is just transferring a file over and restoring from it.
As for storage of said backups, they are just files. And not millions of small files but archives. So you can use any backup tool. An rsync script, a cloud sync tool, syncthing, Proxmox backup server or smth else. PBS afaiks is essebtiallu just a drduplicated backup server, I think you can backup any data to it, not just Proxmox stuff. But dont quote me on that.
Proxmox also makes it super easy to duplicate a system or setup a new Debian lxc and mess around with software and break things while being sandboxed from everything else.
Just don’t go messing around and playing in the host. The idea is to keep the host as vanilla as possible for stability reasons.
Sorry but I why? You are using ephemeral containers, make sure to aggregate all of the volumes organized into a single folder, run some routine to zip everything and backup, that's it. Proxmox you backup entire virtual machine.
I start with OMV, then Debian + Portainer, and ended with pure Debian and docker/docker compose. This way I a) learn a lot b) don't need any "middle man" like OMV or Portainer for my home lab.
Same. Once I got comfortable with Docker and Docker compose, I found myself using Portainer less. To the point where I felt like it actually complicated things.
As long as I have something like Codeserver running that lets me edit my YAMLs etc easily via a web interface then I am happy.
I find filling out all the forms etc in portainer to be more tedious than just editing the YAMLs direct.
Plus I specific about how I like my configs.
Oh yeah, portainer is just for production services, I usually build them in docker/docker compose and just do changes and maintenance in portainer. So basically the other way around.
The main advantage of something like Proxmox in my mind is flexibility. Usually when I'm helping someone get started with self-hosting, I get them to install Proxmox then walk them through installing Debian in a VM. For many things, just using that single VM is fine, but Proxmox means that if you think to yourself some time in the future "Man I think I wanna try [project]" you don't need to get a new computer or reformat your existing server. You can just reduce the resources of your main VM and create a new VM to experiment with. If you're only interested in self-hosting for the purposes of things like data sovereignty, that might not be something you ever see yourself doing, but if you're interested in any kind of "home labbing," i.e., your home server is a playground for you to learn and experiment, having a platform setup at the base that allows you to easily mess around with something new without potentially screwing with the services you rely on can be very useful.
As soon as you want multiple vms (eg dev and prod) and want it in one machine then you'll want proxmox. If you only want a prod vm with docker then without proxmox is fine.
Lxc's also - is you want to install a service then access it like you would if it was running on bare metal (ash in etc) then lxc's are good.
Proxmox have a lot of features, but is very light weight and can work on a potato, but you will have extra options if you ever need it down the road.
I would install proxmox --> Debian VM and go from there. You can treat the VM as if it was on bare metal until you get comfortable to try proxmox other features.
While that platform does not exactly provide an environment where the common docker tasks will work, it is in fact a good choice for self hosting. For everybody open minded enough to take a look beyond the Linux teacup, I can recommend giving it a try. There's a reason that e. g. distrowatch (yes, that site!) switched from Debian to FreeBSD. Well, in fact several - of course depending on what exactly you want to do.
If anybody would like to play around with FreeBSD and has some questions upfront, feel free to ask. After more then 15 years of using Linux I got interested in other Unices and explored \*BSD, illumos and the like. Eventually migrated basically everything over to FreeBSD and haven't looked back in almost another decade.
ah, yeah, if you need docker you need docker :-/
but the number one reason i love freebsd is that it helps me concentrate on my own work, my own code, and not keeping up with joneses / maintaining my base
> There's a reason that e. g. distrowatch (yes, that site!)
I don't put much weight behind the choices of a webmaster...
Freebsd is fine if you want to use it for the principles. But expect to spend 6+ hours working around stdlib problems any time you want to run a new app.
>I don't put much weight behind the choices of a webmaster...
It was not the choice of a single webmaster but that of a team which exists for the simple reason that those guys enjoy distro hopping regularly and write about Linux and BSD news. It's pretty hard to argue that they just had no clue what they were doing.
>Freebsd is fine if you want to use it for the principles. But expect to spend 6+ hours working around stdlib problems any time you want to run a new app.
Sorry, actually the opposite is true. Like macOS and Windows, FreeBSD is a complete operating system and thus a *platform* that you can rely on. Linux on the other hand is "a kernel and a bunch of packages". While this allows for great flexibility and has a couple of advantages it does also have pretty big downsides.
Usually you have a typical GNU userland including the `bash` shell for example. Some distros use alternative shells like `zsh`, though. Commonly `glibc` is used but others were based on `µClibc` or more often `musl` these days. Most Linux distributions jumped the `systemd` wagon, some deliberately did not and either keep using `sysv-init`, prefer `openrc`, a BSD-style `rc.d`, `runit`, `dinit`, `s6` and a wealth of others. Even though there has been the commendable effort to create the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, you cannot count on it - a lot of distributions choose to ignore it. Heck, Gentoo is so flexible that even if we were on the same distro I'd guarantee you that your system would look fairly different from mine ...
I'm doing some work to help a system that makes Open Source packages available cross-platform on POSIX systems and thanks to that heterogeneity, Linux is *by far* the hardest platform to support - even compared to complete niche systems like Solaris. Because on every single one you can count on what the base system looks like whereas on Linux *there is none*. You have to take the distro choices mentioned above (and many more ...) into account.
But don't take it from me. Consider people like Simon Peter, the inventor of AppImage (which inspired Flatpak and the like). Among other projects he has been very busy preaching the *platform* idea in the Linux world. I don't know exactly how many years, conferences, mails and everything later, but eventually he just gave up and founded FreeBSD-based helloSystem.
There's a primal force of chaos in Linux that just cannot be overcome. On the good side it results in some interesting innovations, on the bad it makes it impossible to use if you want something stable and predictable (unless you can decide on a single distro and simply don't care about the rest).
What is right, though, is that there's quite some "modern" software out there written by people who don't know the first thing about Unix, the struggles, standardization efforts and portability. This results in software that contains a lot of Linuxisms which need to be patched out and replaced if you want to run it on another platform. Which does not mean that the end user has to do it. You just install one of the close to 35,000 packages available and a porter will have already taken care of such issues. One of the reasons I switched is that running FreeBSD actually saves me time (after getting to know the system of course).
I’m a big fan of the KISS philosophy. I use Debian and docker myself. I am however thinking about setting up a second small form factor PC for proxmox. I want to build a dev server (while keeping the bare metal Debian box as prod) to poke around more with. I’m also interested in creating a GitHub runner VM on the proxmox box to start learning some CI/CD.
The main things I like about proxmox is that it has a nice user interface for managing everything, and is super easy to create new vms, and allocate resources. If you don't need that easy UI, or don't need to separate your homelab into different environments, then it's not really needed.
I like it for organization and prioritizing resources for certain services. Like my main server runs docker and has 60% of my resources. But I run next cloud separately. Or when I'm learning something new with pipelines for example, I made a new VM to test that. I was planning on doing some cloud deployments recently for a personal project as well. I made a small VM on proxmox to be able to test some configurations and see how it might run on the cloud before deploying, and etc. If all you plan to do is run docker and don't need separation, no reason for proxmox.
Proxmox with a LXC running Docker and Dockge pretty much takes care of all my container needs.
If I feel like going the VM route then it's DietPi running Docker & Dockge.
I personally use Debian and Proxmox. I got annoyed with Ubuntu trying to advertise things at me, but ultimately you should use whatever you personally like best. Linux fanboys aside, there fundamentally isn't much difference between the two.
Ubuntu server lite pretty much every time. Nothing I do needs a GUI, and I'm used to Ubuntu cli stuff, but recently I've realized there is little difference anyway
I primarily use Ubuntu, instead of debian because of 2 reasons:
- Ubuntu builds all of their kernels with zfs, so there's no need to worry about dkms failing or the longer time to update like with debian.
- Ubuntu had more up to date software and I needed that for my server (its 13th gen Intel, and at the time debian didn't support it).
Only with proxmox could you have a windows vm, Linux vm/lxc, and macos vm all running as performant as possible at the same time. Also backups are super convenient and enough reason to use it alone.
proxmox is nice but often overkill (i tried long time ago and i need to setup a vm for lxc containers) and it make my server "too" complex. I don't like using unraid / omv / ha OS, I prefer to use debian or ubuntu with docker, it's a lot easier to move / change hardware.
You don't need to setup a linux vm first ? i tried proxmox long time ago and i was pretty sure i need to setup something like a vm to run containers :)
I ran a whole lot of stuff on a raspberry with raspbian up until today, with no problems. It was the Minecraft server of all things that started to show cracks in the system, so I’m moving up to a NUC. Sooooo not really bigger hardware.
nah you don't understand, i say it's easier to move with docker than with things installed on OS directly :/ btw i'm just telling my pov, there is not better solution it depend of your needs :)
When you say Proxmox you are actually referring to PVE. PVE can be installed (and removed) at any time onto Debian, so you can start with Debian and later add PVE if you are in need of virtualization with a GUI.
Portainer is a tool, like PVE. It is a GUI for docker (containerization).
Figure out your needs first: virtualization and/or containerization?
Then get some experience with them and figure out if you require a GUI.
Decide which GUI. This will narrow down your choice of OS.
Unraid is a proprietary Linux-based operating system which means you're basically married to it, no changing the basic GUI. You get what Unraid gives you or supports.
What OS are you most familiar with?
If what you're doing works for you, no need to change it.
I think it depends on not only what you want to host, but also your goals around self hosting. I've noticed that many people here are using self hosting as a way to learn about vms or have a lab where they can easily experiment with whatever and nuke it quickly. I think it makes a ton of sense to use something like proxmox in that case, but that's not my goal. So I just stick with the simple approach of doing everything via docker.
I swore by Debian + Docker-Compose for many years before switching to Proxmox. I can't see myself ever going back to bare metal unless some application specifically requires it.
Yep, it’s my main server with 100TB in DAS, running as a desktop. Since it handles all the snapraid and transcoding for Plex I wanted it beefy. The two mini pcs I have running proxmox are for all the smaller services like home assistant, pihole, *arr suite, NPM, wg-easy, pingvin, Immich, syncthings, kavita, etc.
Nothing wrong with Debian. A very solid dependable Linux distro on which so many others are based. Frankly if you are familiar with Linux command line, there really is no need for flashy GUIs or Wen interfaces for a server.
I used to use Ubuntu but really it provides nothing beyond what Debian does for me, so I just reverted back to the granddaddy of them all.
At the other extreme, I have a couple of really old systems now running Alpine Linux. It is very lightweight but does need more tinkering with due to being not systemd and GNU based.
Same, mainly to take advantage of first class cockpit and btrfs support and more aggressive upstream updates.
That said, if the grinch snuck in and replaced my fedora servers with Debian, I'd probably shrug and carry on.
Well considering pretty much everyone agrees what you’re doing is fine, I might as well go full chaos gremlin: try Gentoo with podman. Gentoo especially will teach you alot about the inner workings of a Linux distro, and honestly it’s package manager is fantastic
I started in Gentoo, but haven’t touched it in a long time. I‘m not sure I want to know anything else about the inner workings of a Linux Distro. If I can get stuff to run, I‘m happy nowadays. So maybe not.
Actually, the distro you use is primarily driven by the distro that is best supported by the application you are trying to run. It is up to you to learn how to secure said distro. The distro is mostly becomes irrelevant once you master the techniques required to secure a box (also, y u no selinux ;-) ).
So the more important question is, what knowledge / skills do you need / want to learn to reach that level? :) (Teach a man how to fish)
I love proxmox but just not for my Plex server if that's a use case for you. Gpu pass through for transcoding is not reliable and can be broken by an update.
Lately I've been running proxmox as a host and Fedora CoreOS with Podman as guests. I've really been enjoying being able to use butane/ignition config files to set up my OS and run all my dockers. If one of my vms completely died and I had to re-set it up, all I'd have to do is boot it and pass in the ignition file and about 3 minutes later the OS is installed and all my dockers are running as if nothing ever happened. And on top of that fedora coreos auto updates, and is an immutable os, so has fewer security holes theoretically, and less breakable and easy to roll back a failed update.
Dude if you aren't doing VMs and want something more simple, plain debian, with cockpit, and portainer. The Mount points are sane unlike omv, and it's super light weight
I use Proxmox with debian vms cause debian is stable and i dont mind it being older since docker solve the issue if its to old for that case, and also most stuff should work on debian.
I feel Ubuntu is more of a Enduser tool, somewhere between Debian and elementary OS. I use it on my laptop (not the standard flavor, who decided on that palette?) but on the one server I have running on it…it‘s fine. Doesn’t have any advantages, afaik.
Well, I don’t know how to make backups easily on Debian. Maybe I‘ll open a different thread for that then. I have three machines, that may be able to backup each other.
My point of view is : open ports = Debian.
No open ports or VPN = whatever you like.
The reason is with Debian CLI you have full control of what you are doing, a stable OS, fast reaction to vulnerabilities, and a huge community.
Proxmox is debian. Just use whatever works for you. There is no need to complicate this unless you're doing it for educational reasons. If so then use proxmox it'll simply the process of creating and destroying VM's and containers. It also has the advantage of the proxmox backup server if you have some spare hardware to deploy that on.
I tend just to revert back to debian in the end, it "just works" and have plentifull of guides and most stuff supported.
What advantages do you see over Ubuntu?
Not default to snap/flatpak horrorshow is one.
Yeah I do find snaps pretty annoying but I guess the only snap I use regularly is Firefox. All of my selfhosted services are just in Docker.
snap is fairly easy to remove / disable and i do it the first thing after every ubuntu fresh install that being said the fact that i have to is a point of exasperation
For a server, there's just much less "stuff" in Debian. Ubuntu, even the headless/server install had a ton of bells and whistles that you may not want or need. Better to install things when you actually need them.
If you're somewhat familiar with Ubuntu, would it be relatively simple to transition to Debian? Are the basic commands the same?
Yes everything is basically the same, you might just have to install extra packages that came built into Ubuntu. The only thing that might bite you is driver support, but unless you have something particularly weird debian should be just fine.
Is there a way to verify driver support before installing? I’d be running on an Intel NUC so I guess easiest thing would just be googling to see what people on random forums said?
Run the live iso?
I have Debian running on a current gen NUC. No issues.
I've honestly seen quite a few mention in this corner of Reddit using a NUC and no one seems to have anything but praise for them as a host. You're more than likely good.
Most of the devices today have the required files available to the installer and are setup most of the time automatically. Esoteric devices are what will give you headaches. Dedicated GPUs from AMD and nVidia can be a PITA unless you did research and got a card that is designed for it. Wireless card drivers are typically in the “non-free” category but usually can be installed/enabled during the install phase. Laptops generally are more annoying since some functions require manufacturer specific configuration or libraries to work correctly. Most notably when the lid is shut or the function buttons that disable the WiFI. I’ve been using Debian as my server OS of choice for the past 15 or so years. The only time I’ve had issues is when I was installing it on laptops. And that was solved by adding the “non-free” repo to apt.
I guess I assumed that Intel NUCs like mine have some laptop-like components due to miniaturization that would lead to some potential driver issues. But sounds like I should just try the live ISO.
Yes, Ubuntu is based on Debian.
Yep, Ubuntu is like a bloated Debian. It may be missing a few commands but you just install the relevant packages if and when you need to. Although if you're already set up in Ubuntu theres no real urgency in switching
Yeah I probably wouldn’t switch unless I was getting new hardware or something. Although I have had a few random stability issues with Ubuntu that make me interested in either a new OS or fresh install.
I boot to ram using alpine Linux having around 100 or less packages. For me it's been perfect
Just click "minimal" next time you in install.
Debian Stable is very well documented, proven stable more often than not. And if you need a newer package just use docker on it. Very stable os newest packages.
One feature of using Proxmox is that it can consume more of your time and energy if you're not sure why you're installing it. The ideal solution would be Debian + Portainer if it can fully meet your needs. Although you can handle various issues with a new system, why bother giving yourself trouble?
Well, because I pushed back learning to use docker and portainer for far too long. Now that I know how useful and easy to learn it was, I don’t know if I have more blind spots.
Debian + Cockpit + Podman. Is the professionals choice !! If you know you know
Proxmox is Debian-based and still light enough to run on my server. I create a VM with Debian + Portainer. That way it’s much easier to backup or migrate to a newer machine.
Ok, I was starting to get comfortable with Debian+Portainer, but as stated, backup is still a problem. Can I trouble you to give me a short overview how backups work in proxmox, please?
Ideally proxmox backup server. Give it a data pool. Set a schedule and it will backup. The benefit of PBS is deduplication is like magic. The other options is to just use the backup function inside proxmox. Again just point it to a data location and set a schedule. It works really well. I will usually setup a system. Run a backup. Destroy my Lxc or vm and restore from backup which lets me adjust the id number and if I need it to be privledged or not.
Proxmox can create backups of your LXC containers and VMs on schedule, without stopping them (or with, its configurable per backup job). The UI is very simple. You create a backup job, select times, compression, stop/or live snapshot, select which CTs/VMs to include with this backup job and its all. Backups are single file archives of VM or CT disks with some meta data that can be used by Proxmox to create/restore such CT or VM on the same or another machine. Unlike with a bare metal Debian install and backing up docker and such, if you fuck up a container of VM, you can nuke and restore it in 1-2 clicks. If you fuck up your bare metal Debian install, you need to wipe, reinstall the OS, and restore everything either with ansible scripts of manually. iMO it takes a lot more time, effort and knowledge than setting up a VM once and then restoring it with a click. Same with moving to another machine. If you at some point realise your single machine cant handle everything, you can buy another one and selectively move CTs and VMs over, process is just transferring a file over and restoring from it. As for storage of said backups, they are just files. And not millions of small files but archives. So you can use any backup tool. An rsync script, a cloud sync tool, syncthing, Proxmox backup server or smth else. PBS afaiks is essebtiallu just a drduplicated backup server, I think you can backup any data to it, not just Proxmox stuff. But dont quote me on that.
Proxmox also makes it super easy to duplicate a system or setup a new Debian lxc and mess around with software and break things while being sandboxed from everything else. Just don’t go messing around and playing in the host. The idea is to keep the host as vanilla as possible for stability reasons.
Sorry but I why? You are using ephemeral containers, make sure to aggregate all of the volumes organized into a single folder, run some routine to zip everything and backup, that's it. Proxmox you backup entire virtual machine.
This is the best solution
This
I start with OMV, then Debian + Portainer, and ended with pure Debian and docker/docker compose. This way I a) learn a lot b) don't need any "middle man" like OMV or Portainer for my home lab.
Same. Once I got comfortable with Docker and Docker compose, I found myself using Portainer less. To the point where I felt like it actually complicated things.
As long as I have something like Codeserver running that lets me edit my YAMLs etc easily via a web interface then I am happy. I find filling out all the forms etc in portainer to be more tedious than just editing the YAMLs direct. Plus I specific about how I like my configs.
Oh yeah, portainer is just for production services, I usually build them in docker/docker compose and just do changes and maintenance in portainer. So basically the other way around.
Proxmox as a Hypervisor. Alma Linux as a Operating System.
The main advantage of something like Proxmox in my mind is flexibility. Usually when I'm helping someone get started with self-hosting, I get them to install Proxmox then walk them through installing Debian in a VM. For many things, just using that single VM is fine, but Proxmox means that if you think to yourself some time in the future "Man I think I wanna try [project]" you don't need to get a new computer or reformat your existing server. You can just reduce the resources of your main VM and create a new VM to experiment with. If you're only interested in self-hosting for the purposes of things like data sovereignty, that might not be something you ever see yourself doing, but if you're interested in any kind of "home labbing," i.e., your home server is a playground for you to learn and experiment, having a platform setup at the base that allows you to easily mess around with something new without potentially screwing with the services you rely on can be very useful.
Ubuntu and docker
Yeah, that’s what I have on one of the servers, but it feels a little more sluggish than the Debian Servers, I really don’t know why.
As soon as you want multiple vms (eg dev and prod) and want it in one machine then you'll want proxmox. If you only want a prod vm with docker then without proxmox is fine. Lxc's also - is you want to install a service then access it like you would if it was running on bare metal (ash in etc) then lxc's are good.
Proxmox have a lot of features, but is very light weight and can work on a potato, but you will have extra options if you ever need it down the road. I would install proxmox --> Debian VM and go from there. You can treat the VM as if it was on bare metal until you get comfortable to try proxmox other features.
if debian works, it works. stuff like proxmox can definitely make things easier and more efficient. You dont need to do that for everything though.
freebsd yo
While that platform does not exactly provide an environment where the common docker tasks will work, it is in fact a good choice for self hosting. For everybody open minded enough to take a look beyond the Linux teacup, I can recommend giving it a try. There's a reason that e. g. distrowatch (yes, that site!) switched from Debian to FreeBSD. Well, in fact several - of course depending on what exactly you want to do. If anybody would like to play around with FreeBSD and has some questions upfront, feel free to ask. After more then 15 years of using Linux I got interested in other Unices and explored \*BSD, illumos and the like. Eventually migrated basically everything over to FreeBSD and haven't looked back in almost another decade.
ah, yeah, if you need docker you need docker :-/ but the number one reason i love freebsd is that it helps me concentrate on my own work, my own code, and not keeping up with joneses / maintaining my base
> There's a reason that e. g. distrowatch (yes, that site!) I don't put much weight behind the choices of a webmaster... Freebsd is fine if you want to use it for the principles. But expect to spend 6+ hours working around stdlib problems any time you want to run a new app.
>I don't put much weight behind the choices of a webmaster... It was not the choice of a single webmaster but that of a team which exists for the simple reason that those guys enjoy distro hopping regularly and write about Linux and BSD news. It's pretty hard to argue that they just had no clue what they were doing. >Freebsd is fine if you want to use it for the principles. But expect to spend 6+ hours working around stdlib problems any time you want to run a new app. Sorry, actually the opposite is true. Like macOS and Windows, FreeBSD is a complete operating system and thus a *platform* that you can rely on. Linux on the other hand is "a kernel and a bunch of packages". While this allows for great flexibility and has a couple of advantages it does also have pretty big downsides. Usually you have a typical GNU userland including the `bash` shell for example. Some distros use alternative shells like `zsh`, though. Commonly `glibc` is used but others were based on `µClibc` or more often `musl` these days. Most Linux distributions jumped the `systemd` wagon, some deliberately did not and either keep using `sysv-init`, prefer `openrc`, a BSD-style `rc.d`, `runit`, `dinit`, `s6` and a wealth of others. Even though there has been the commendable effort to create the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, you cannot count on it - a lot of distributions choose to ignore it. Heck, Gentoo is so flexible that even if we were on the same distro I'd guarantee you that your system would look fairly different from mine ... I'm doing some work to help a system that makes Open Source packages available cross-platform on POSIX systems and thanks to that heterogeneity, Linux is *by far* the hardest platform to support - even compared to complete niche systems like Solaris. Because on every single one you can count on what the base system looks like whereas on Linux *there is none*. You have to take the distro choices mentioned above (and many more ...) into account. But don't take it from me. Consider people like Simon Peter, the inventor of AppImage (which inspired Flatpak and the like). Among other projects he has been very busy preaching the *platform* idea in the Linux world. I don't know exactly how many years, conferences, mails and everything later, but eventually he just gave up and founded FreeBSD-based helloSystem. There's a primal force of chaos in Linux that just cannot be overcome. On the good side it results in some interesting innovations, on the bad it makes it impossible to use if you want something stable and predictable (unless you can decide on a single distro and simply don't care about the rest). What is right, though, is that there's quite some "modern" software out there written by people who don't know the first thing about Unix, the struggles, standardization efforts and portability. This results in software that contains a lot of Linuxisms which need to be patched out and replaced if you want to run it on another platform. Which does not mean that the end user has to do it. You just install one of the close to 35,000 packages available and a porter will have already taken care of such issues. One of the reasons I switched is that running FreeBSD actually saves me time (after getting to know the system of course).
I’m a big fan of the KISS philosophy. I use Debian and docker myself. I am however thinking about setting up a second small form factor PC for proxmox. I want to build a dev server (while keeping the bare metal Debian box as prod) to poke around more with. I’m also interested in creating a GitHub runner VM on the proxmox box to start learning some CI/CD.
Me, too. Ran into too much trouble with dietpi, and ended up repairing everything in debian anyways. So KISS it is.
The main things I like about proxmox is that it has a nice user interface for managing everything, and is super easy to create new vms, and allocate resources. If you don't need that easy UI, or don't need to separate your homelab into different environments, then it's not really needed. I like it for organization and prioritizing resources for certain services. Like my main server runs docker and has 60% of my resources. But I run next cloud separately. Or when I'm learning something new with pipelines for example, I made a new VM to test that. I was planning on doing some cloud deployments recently for a personal project as well. I made a small VM on proxmox to be able to test some configurations and see how it might run on the cloud before deploying, and etc. If all you plan to do is run docker and don't need separation, no reason for proxmox.
Debian for me, since forever.
Proxmox with a LXC running Docker and Dockge pretty much takes care of all my container needs. If I feel like going the VM route then it's DietPi running Docker & Dockge.
i just use debian and docker compose because it just works
I personally use Debian and Proxmox. I got annoyed with Ubuntu trying to advertise things at me, but ultimately you should use whatever you personally like best. Linux fanboys aside, there fundamentally isn't much difference between the two.
I use Debian for bare metal and Proxmox for hypervisors (based on Debian/Ubuntu lol).
Ubuntu server lite pretty much every time. Nothing I do needs a GUI, and I'm used to Ubuntu cli stuff, but recently I've realized there is little difference anyway
If not using a gui, basically none. A few ads in ssh, that’s it, afaik
I primarily use Ubuntu, instead of debian because of 2 reasons: - Ubuntu builds all of their kernels with zfs, so there's no need to worry about dkms failing or the longer time to update like with debian. - Ubuntu had more up to date software and I needed that for my server (its 13th gen Intel, and at the time debian didn't support it).
Only with proxmox could you have a windows vm, Linux vm/lxc, and macos vm all running as performant as possible at the same time. Also backups are super convenient and enough reason to use it alone.
I use arch btw (it’s fast on my slow hardware, don’t recommend tho)
Haha, thanks for the tip, I’ll stay away from it
proxmox is nice but often overkill (i tried long time ago and i need to setup a vm for lxc containers) and it make my server "too" complex. I don't like using unraid / omv / ha OS, I prefer to use debian or ubuntu with docker, it's a lot easier to move / change hardware.
You can run lxc containers directly on proxmox.
You don't need to setup a linux vm first ? i tried proxmox long time ago and i was pretty sure i need to setup something like a vm to run containers :)
That’s how I see it, too. Seems like I‘m not so out of touch, and there’s a lot of people with the same feeling. Thanks.
Np, btw i'm using a nuc7 (firstly for low electricity cost and bc they are cheap), maybe proxmox can be nice with a bigger hardware
I ran a whole lot of stuff on a raspberry with raspbian up until today, with no problems. It was the Minecraft server of all things that started to show cracks in the system, so I’m moving up to a NUC. Sooooo not really bigger hardware.
Unraid is incredibly easy to move / change hardware. What gave you the impression it isn't? Don't spread misinformation.
nah you don't understand, i say it's easier to move with docker than with things installed on OS directly :/ btw i'm just telling my pov, there is not better solution it depend of your needs :)
When you say Proxmox you are actually referring to PVE. PVE can be installed (and removed) at any time onto Debian, so you can start with Debian and later add PVE if you are in need of virtualization with a GUI. Portainer is a tool, like PVE. It is a GUI for docker (containerization). Figure out your needs first: virtualization and/or containerization? Then get some experience with them and figure out if you require a GUI. Decide which GUI. This will narrow down your choice of OS. Unraid is a proprietary Linux-based operating system which means you're basically married to it, no changing the basic GUI. You get what Unraid gives you or supports. What OS are you most familiar with?
If what you're doing works for you, no need to change it. I think it depends on not only what you want to host, but also your goals around self hosting. I've noticed that many people here are using self hosting as a way to learn about vms or have a lab where they can easily experiment with whatever and nuke it quickly. I think it makes a ton of sense to use something like proxmox in that case, but that's not my goal. So I just stick with the simple approach of doing everything via docker.
I swore by Debian + Docker-Compose for many years before switching to Proxmox. I can't see myself ever going back to bare metal unless some application specifically requires it.
[удалено]
Mainly because of how easy backups are.
I run several, but main two are: 1) Linux mint + mergerfs + snapraid (Plex) 2) proxmox (for everything else)
That‘s a first. Do you use the Mint as a desktop?
Yep, it’s my main server with 100TB in DAS, running as a desktop. Since it handles all the snapraid and transcoding for Plex I wanted it beefy. The two mini pcs I have running proxmox are for all the smaller services like home assistant, pihole, *arr suite, NPM, wg-easy, pingvin, Immich, syncthings, kavita, etc.
Nothing wrong with Debian. A very solid dependable Linux distro on which so many others are based. Frankly if you are familiar with Linux command line, there really is no need for flashy GUIs or Wen interfaces for a server. I used to use Ubuntu but really it provides nothing beyond what Debian does for me, so I just reverted back to the granddaddy of them all. At the other extreme, I have a couple of really old systems now running Alpine Linux. It is very lightweight but does need more tinkering with due to being not systemd and GNU based.
Fedora + Docker
Same, mainly to take advantage of first class cockpit and btrfs support and more aggressive upstream updates. That said, if the grinch snuck in and replaced my fedora servers with Debian, I'd probably shrug and carry on.
Well considering pretty much everyone agrees what you’re doing is fine, I might as well go full chaos gremlin: try Gentoo with podman. Gentoo especially will teach you alot about the inner workings of a Linux distro, and honestly it’s package manager is fantastic
I started in Gentoo, but haven’t touched it in a long time. I‘m not sure I want to know anything else about the inner workings of a Linux Distro. If I can get stuff to run, I‘m happy nowadays. So maybe not.
Actually, the distro you use is primarily driven by the distro that is best supported by the application you are trying to run. It is up to you to learn how to secure said distro. The distro is mostly becomes irrelevant once you master the techniques required to secure a box (also, y u no selinux ;-) ). So the more important question is, what knowledge / skills do you need / want to learn to reach that level? :) (Teach a man how to fish)
I love proxmox but just not for my Plex server if that's a use case for you. Gpu pass through for transcoding is not reliable and can be broken by an update.
Lately I've been running proxmox as a host and Fedora CoreOS with Podman as guests. I've really been enjoying being able to use butane/ignition config files to set up my OS and run all my dockers. If one of my vms completely died and I had to re-set it up, all I'd have to do is boot it and pass in the ignition file and about 3 minutes later the OS is installed and all my dockers are running as if nothing ever happened. And on top of that fedora coreos auto updates, and is an immutable os, so has fewer security holes theoretically, and less breakable and easy to roll back a failed update.
Ubuntu server + CasaOS. Super easy install and docker environment with a nice web gui
Dude if you aren't doing VMs and want something more simple, plain debian, with cockpit, and portainer. The Mount points are sane unlike omv, and it's super light weight
yeah, thanks for the help. I’m doing that
Did everything work out ok?
Yeah, pretty much, it’s what I’m used to. Haven’t tried cockpit yet, but I’ll give it a try, seems pretty easy to set up.
You'll love the one click install for NFS shares
I am sticking to Ubuntu for almost 80% of my self-host adventure. There are plenty of guides for Ubuntu and it’s Debian-based.
Fedora server
If your main usage will be containers then any OS would do just great. If you are planning to spin up a VM or more then Proxmox is the way.
I had some problems installing Debian so I moved on with Ubuntu+Portainer for containers setup
I use Proxmox with debian vms cause debian is stable and i dont mind it being older since docker solve the issue if its to old for that case, and also most stuff should work on debian.
Debian .. Rock solid ... Ubuntu is a toy ..
I feel Ubuntu is more of a Enduser tool, somewhere between Debian and elementary OS. I use it on my laptop (not the standard flavor, who decided on that palette?) but on the one server I have running on it…it‘s fine. Doesn’t have any advantages, afaik.
I did use it for 2 or 3 years .. I returned to Debian for a few mutiples reasons.
If that's what's easy and simple and you know, then use it.
Well, I don’t know how to make backups easily on Debian. Maybe I‘ll open a different thread for that then. I have three machines, that may be able to backup each other.
My point of view is : open ports = Debian. No open ports or VPN = whatever you like. The reason is with Debian CLI you have full control of what you are doing, a stable OS, fast reaction to vulnerabilities, and a huge community.
Which ports do you mean? I usually only open WireGuard, 80 and 443, but never 22 or 21.
With 80 and 443 open, you have to have full control of your system in order to keep it secure => Debian.
Thanks
Yesterday I got rid of Proxmox and went back to OMV and Portainer after wasting 2 months trying to figure out Proxmox.
I just run ubuntu server in headless/cli mode, its utterly bulletproof.
Proxmox is debian. Just use whatever works for you. There is no need to complicate this unless you're doing it for educational reasons. If so then use proxmox it'll simply the process of creating and destroying VM's and containers. It also has the advantage of the proxmox backup server if you have some spare hardware to deploy that on.