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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.