I use Debian flavors for my daily drivers. I have no complaints, no real desire to switch it up on that front.
However, I am starting to get into self-hosting and homelab projects. I'd like to start test driving some light-weight distros of a different flavor.
I'd prefer a GUI be available, but the environment and WM is pretty inconsequential-- except it shouldn't be bloated. I'll install any additional apps I want, I don't need a curated mid-to-heavy-weight distro.
The plan is to make heavy use of Docker images, to try to maintain a clean and modular setup of services. If that makes any difference.
Suggestions? Any slim distros you're just gaga for?
Alpine Linux is often recommended in similar circumstances. I've never tried it so can't say how it is. Of course you could use Debian with a light WM.
Alpine is fucking bae. I love that little distro so goddamned much.
I have some experience with Alpine, usually in the form of images for CI pipelines and other remote usecases. It never occurred to me to check it out as a locally installed option.
I don't see the point of it as a locally installed option. Why save disk space?
Use vanilla Debian. It is well suited for that purposes and it is great in terms of long time support: stable distro updates almost never break anything and upgrading to new release is possible and relatively simple. Don't listen to those recommending Arch or Fedora, upgrading them is a pain especially when you have to support many servers.
If you want something more lightweight, you may try Alpine. It is also a distro of choice for docker containers. However I'd prefer Debian for the host.
Honestly, the more I've thought about it, the more this feels like a sound solution. And then I can just run VMs for distros I want to sandbox in.
Maybe have a look at Proxmox, a Debian-based hypervisor for VMs and containers.
I've actually really wanted to try Proxmox. Both for personal use, but because the experience/knowledge would benefit my career.
Upgrading them should be done frequently since it's a rolling release distro. If you wait a long time and then do a large update, you may run into issues because they are not really designed for that. You should always be on the latest version of packages.
What do you mean? What happens if you leave it too long? How long is too long?
Nothing usually happens but the distro is not tested in that way. The devs don't wait six months and then update every package in the system at once. It probably works (and it has for me, every time) but it's just not what users do normally. They keep it updated all the time.
I have a arch and debian server. I am afraid of the arch server. Debian I haven't touched since install other than updatingbit once in a while.
You have experience of Debian use it, or maybe go down fedora, rocky for homelab. You would want to experiment on the homelab not with it.
Nothing is as good as an Arch server... I love the adrenalin running in my veins every update!
I even set an autoupdate script to make things even more scarier!
Despite the adrenalin rush, my Arch never broke
I have had two kernel regressions causing unbootable install. Though i still use Arch on my laptop. For the homelab I would go Debian.
For my daily laptop I use Arch with LTS kernel. I've using it for years and had only 1 issue with normal kernel (that made me switch to LTS)
Also I used Arch as server for long time in my homelab, however now I changed to OrangePi and Raspberry Pi, so I use Ubuntu
I just recently moved my home server from truenas to RHEL. I already use Fedora on my laptop and the enterprise Linux space has incredible support. Something like Rocky could be perfect for you if you value stability and long term support
I use proxmox and Ubuntu 23.10 on the VM images. I like to have a recent kernel.
Otherwise my favorite is arch linux but proxmox didn't have recent arch images in their repo.
