Hello! I just watched Jay’s video on setting up an Ubuntu Server 24.04 install, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pln-tglFxwg .
I’m still pretty new to this, and looking to set up a server VM that I can use as a template for things like MariaDB, Minecraft, etc.
One thing I’m not really clear about from a home server perspective (versus a commercial/enterprise production perspective) is when Debian is a preferred base for a server vs. Ubuntu Server.
Or to put it another way, what would I need to be doing that I would want to use Debian instead?
I’d prefer to standardize on either Debian or Ubuntu for my templates and most of my VMs (excluding of course those that will be more bespoke … I already have one that depends on Lubuntu for reasons), but I don’t really feel like I know enough to make the decision yet.
My biggest hesitation with Ubuntu Server, especially now, has always been that the Snap store can’t be officially disabled or uninstalled anymore. The last time I looked, it couldn’t be officially done.
One of my Proxmox hosts is memory constrained, so I’d like to create templates that have a small resource footprint. My understanding was that disabling snapd was a significant resource savings in older versions of Ubuntu where you could actually do that.
Also, since it’s free for personal use, if I go with Ubuntu, is it worth it to get Ubuntu Pro?
Almost always, except the times when debian runs very behind with packages and libraries (like towards the end of its lifecycle) and the tarball installation of packages fails with dependency issues. Which tends to almost never happen these days, so… go debian?
Ubuntu still has more general support online when you ask questions (although the results tend to be quite old at this point), so I guess when you’re running into issues, you might find a solution for ubuntu online already, instead of going on irc and ask for debian help (try not to bother debian maintainers with unrelated questions about the programs you are trying to run not launching, like say minecraft).
Debian.
Not really, unless your mincraft server or what-not is so important that you can’t reboot and you want livepatch support, or if you want to run the same server past the EOL of the OS (which you shouldn’t anyway, LTS is a scam and enterprises should stop using LTS releases too).
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Thanks!
I’m working on putting together a (set of) Debian template(s) now.
I’m also looking at NixOS for really small footprint VMs (like Docker hosts), but that’s more experimental.
I really like how much documentation there is to do various self-hosted whatever with Debian. A lot of projects having their own APT repos just makes things so much easier.
NixOS is cool, not sure what you mean by lightweight VMs. Last I checked, lxc nixos containers weren’t working well, unless you ran them under nixos. There’s also vpsAdminOS, but I never tried it out, can’t vouch for it.
Supposedly nixos can run in docker (which isn’t too far from lxc), but I, again, never tried it.
Debian has its legacy of support (things like zabbix, grafana, prometheus and others just ship .deb packages to download, whereas nixos needs to make them).