I use Debian as my daily driver, but I’m still a newbie. I would like to selfhost a few apps, initially on a VPS, but I will probably move to a local PC once I diagnose what is broken with my old computer.
The guides at https://selfhosting.sh/ always recommend Ubuntu Server LTS for newbies, but Ubuntu seems to have bad PR and I already run Debian on my home PC. On one hand, I am a newbie and I guess Ubuntu might be easier to set up and maintain. Though, I don’t HOW exactly? On the other hand, if I have Debian on my home PC and on my server, they are the same system, so I’d be learning the same system at two places and with two usage scenarios. But it might be easier to make mistakes on Debian…?
What is your opinion/recommendation?
EDIT: thank you everyone! My gut feeling was Debian and your responses were overwhelmingly in favor of Debian, so Debian it is :)
I use Debian as my daily driver
Chances are that you would find Ubuntu not just more complicated, but unneccessary complicated.
Stay with Debian. It can do everything.
Debian is better as a server host. Ubuntu is not easier for a server for anything except initial installation but you’ve already done that once with Debian so you’ll be fine. Only reason to use Ubuntu is if you want core software updates every 6 months and for this purpose you don’t. And can still have the option for newer software in select cases using containers.
Never Ubuntu, debian for server, fedora for desktop and arch/cachyos for tech fun.
I used to be the same but honestly arch has been way more stable and easier to use than fedora ever was.
Are you me?
If you’re already using Debian on desktop, then Debian on a VPS makes sense from a maintenance perspective: you only have to track one set of security updates. When there’s suddenly a critical update for some vulnerability, you can update both at once because it’s the same upstream repos. Whereas with Ubuntu on your VPS, you’d have to be mindful to make sure to check back when the same vulnerability is patched there.
Do not underestimate the effort to upkeeping a server, and do try to unify your procedures so you’re spending less time doing the necessary things, and more time building up your self hosting stack.
Choosy self-hosters choose Debian.
That said, I don’t recommend hosting software at the bare metal level - use VMs or containers. Far easier to manage and isolate.
Ubuntu’s “reputation” is nonsense. It’s a great distro for servers. Security updates are really fast and using snaps in a server environment is really great. I recommend running things like Docker or Tailscale off snap. They will revert to a previous image if an update fails. Extra stability for a server as you run automatic updates. If you run everything that is not in the base install off a snap, you have an extra layer of sandboxing against any supply chain attack for dependencies.
Ubuntu will have more recent packages, that doesnt really matter in a server environment. Debian is otherwise fine, I just dislike it’s installer and prefer Ubuntu’s. I found it easier to sync third party drivers on Ubuntu.
Ubuntu Pro gets you livepatches for kernal issues, which may be worthwhile. Also done without rebooting.
Ubuntu also gives you better apparmour default profiles on more things, whereas on debian, its up to you to set them up.
Debian will be exactly the same, its just more conservative and has less of those extras I mentioned. May be marginally lighter on resources for that. Either are fine.
Ubuntu Pro gets you livepatches for kernal issues, which may be worthwhile.
I use Ubuntu ESM. For their free, personal tier of Ubuntu Pro, you get 5 machines or 50 for active community members.
Yep this right here, I have used Ubuntu LTS for servers both my own and for work for years now and it works fine. I also don’t think snaps are as big of a deal as people make them out to be, the only snap I am actually forced to use is the mass snap and that is a canonical product so whatever. I even use it on some rpi4/5 even and it works great for use with workloads suited for a pi. Now, 10 years ago this was a different story, but these days Ubuntu LTS is a great OS overall.
Debian is also great though (and if I was building some sort of appliance OS I would prob start with that since it has the fewest customizations to start with) but after you use any of the deb based distros enough they are all basically start to look the same to operate so pick one you want to learn and use that until you have a reason to change, learn the tools not the distro and you will be fine.
All of that said though, every distro has idiosyncrasies but the Linux CLI skills you learn are definitely transferable so it’s not as big of a choice as it is made out to be sometimes, especially now that containers and systemd are everywhere. That is …unless you decide to pick Solaris or one of the BSDs but those are a whole other animal 😀
Yeah an appliance distro would be a different consideration. For me Ubuntu is really flexible and a great docker host. I feel it’s safer to tinker with since you get those extra layers of containment and sandboxing.
If I was to build an appliance I might also start with Debian, but so far I have used FreeBSD. Works great on my NAS, where I use XigmaNAS. You can transfer a surprisingly lot of skills. Learning what was common to FreeBSD and Linux really helped me with cli.
I’m curious to try making stuff with Ubuntu Core. I think it has potential, but that’s a future deep dive and project. lol
Hah same here, core has been on my list for a while especially for the pi but i keep getting distracted :D
The only thing I know about apparmour is that it breaks some permissions for a couple of my machines, and I have to disable them in the container config in order for the containers to boot
SNAP also doesn’t work well with old hardware because of compression. It’s ironic to recommend system riddled with incompatible compression to someone who explicitly wrote in a post that they would be using outdated hardware.
I think that’s more of a Ubuntu Desktop concern. My thinkpad has a 4th gen i5 and launches Firefox maybe half a second slower on a fresh reboot and afterwards its normal.
Its really not relevant to a server who has all the time in the world to boot and stays up. Once the snap is launched, its launched, works fine afterwards. It’s all cached in the RAM or temp data or whatever afterwards.
Ideally your server install would be on an SSD and your data on HDDs. Performance will be good with that setup.
Never mind what’s ideal, in reality, one of my servers is running on a Core 2 Duo T7600 and when I installed ubuntu on it, it took 24 minutes to boot due to the unzipping of the base snap image in ubuntu server. Older hardware does not become faster just because os requirements change. And yes, I left ubuntu as soon as snap came out, i think that was 2018.
UPD: and of course I’m not going to change one of the local servers just because Canonical decided to release another system. Thanks. For 20 years the processor has been routing packets and will do so for another 20 without any problems. Just switched to another OS.
At least it supports 64 bit then. 😅
Listen, can’t speak for 20 year old cpu, but yeah snaps are more optimized now than in 2018.
You are already familiar with Debian, so it will be easier. Debian is more friendly than you might think. This is enough to choose it.
Don’t use Ubuntu as a server. Pretty much every server application will run happily on Debian, meanwhile Canonical keeps adding/changing shit that is Ubuntu-specific and has broken otherwise-functioning server installations. I may or may not have personal experience with this.
Ubuntu used to be the go-to, but Canonical is quickly becoming the poster child for Linux enshittification.
For servers, use Debian and never think about it again. Except the one or two times a year it should probably be rebooted because of kernel updates.
As someone who ran Ubuntu server for a few years before moving to Debian. I would recommend Debian over Ubuntu just because I have had to do less maintenance with it. When I was on Ubuntu updating it was a constant concern of “will something change that is bad” for example they pushed the kernel live patch and the Ubuntu subscription banner as an update instead of an upgrade, so I updated as normal, and there it was.
I dislike OS’s that install new packages as part of their update procedures (an update that installs a new package instead of replacing an existing one should be reserved for upgrades), and Debian has never done that with me, so Debian is where I stay.
Jump right into proxmox and use container templates for everything and spin up and kill virtual machines for experimentation!
If you already know Debian that’s a big point in its favor. Nothing beats a distro you’re familiar with. (And I’d make the same argument if you were used to Ubuntu.)
I’ve used both Debian and Ubuntu Server on my home servers and I ended up returning to Debian.
- Debian embodies and follows the most essential Linux values. It’s open, it’s run by an open organization, it avoids proprietary stuff.
- Debian is long-lived. It’s been around for 30 years, it’s mature, self-sustaining, community-run project, and it will be around 30 years from now. Whereas I wouldn’t bet on Canonical being around in 30 years.
- The upgrade path for Debian is better than for Ubuntu Server LTS.(1) You can upgrade it in-place between major versions a lot more reliably and painlessly than Ubuntu.
- Debian is dedicated to being stable. (Please run stable, btw.)
- Debian is a lot more resource-friendly than Ubuntu Server.
I’ve ended up concluding that Ubuntu Server is Debian, just with more quirks. It offers nothing essential that you can’t do on Debian, and it will just complicate your life when the LTS support period eventually runs out (and even during LTS, when you have to jump through hoops like Ubuntu One to keep updates coming.)
(1) You can fuck up both Ubuntu and Debian’s upgrades by adding a lot of 3rd-party repos because
aptdoesn’t safeguard against external repos interfering with the core repos’ dependency graph.So the trick is to keep the OS minimal, install only Docker from its repo and install anything else in Docker containers. That way you benefit the most from Debian being stable and very little from Ubuntu Server.
If you also need to run system containers and virtual machines you can add Incus later to the mix alongside Docker and still keep your host OS lean and simple.
You can also consider completely migrating to Proxmox later, which is also Debian under the hood but it’s a more turnkey solution. I wouldn’t recommend jumping straight into Proxmox unless you’re fairly sure that you’d need to run VMs. (If you’re unsure stick to plain Debian for now.)
So the trick is to keep the OS minimal, install only Docker from its repo and install anything else in Docker containers.
Why from Docker’s repo and not from Debian’s? I just did a quick
apt search dockerand I seedocker.ioanddocker-cli.Debian’s versions lag badly behind Docker’s. You’d always be missing the latest features. Docker introduces them at a steady pace and it can get annoying to see people talking about a new useful improvement and then months passing before it gets to you.
Maybe I don’t need the new features :)
You say that but sometimes they come up with stuff that’s really useful and it can be very annoying to not have it. Like when they integrated compose into the main.
Also, if you later decide to switch to the official version you’ll have to handle the upgrade carefully or you risk wiping out all your images, containers, networks, volumes etc. Which can be fine if you have backups of all the relevant functional definitions and the volumes and so on, but obviously a huge pain if it catches you unprepared.
Mind you, this can also happen by tinkering with stuff in
/etc/docker/daemon.json, which is how I originally learned to back up my shit.Ok, I will keep that in mind. I’m just wary of what you said earlier:
You can fuck up both Ubuntu and Debian’s upgrades by adding a lot of 3rd-party repos because
aptdoesn’t safeguard against external repos interfering with the core repos’ dependency graph.You’re not the first person to tell me not to add too many external repositories on Debian for the same reason.
In Docker’s case is a non-issue because they were careful to use completely different names for all their packages. It’s only when the external repo uses the same names as the core that the dependency resolver can get confused.
Rant:
aptshould either completely forbid external repos from using core package names (like Arch does), or look at both the package name and repo URL when deciding if a package is the same, not just package name.I’m guessing that letting external repos “hijack” a package name was once upon a time seen as a feature and then they never got around to fixing it.
You’re installing a headless system right? Ubuntu and Debian are going to have very similar if not downright identical day to day operating procedures, including installing and setting up new things. Ubuntu is going to have software packages coming from a different repository and they may be newer (though this rarely matters) and the initial install may be different. One is backed by a for profit corporation and one by a large open source community. Whenever you need help, guides for Debian will probably work on Ubuntu and vice versa.
For home self hosting use, it boils down to you own philosophy. In practice, it won’t really matter… they’re both really similar.
I proudly use Debian BTW.
One thing I read about is that Ubuntu provides unattended updates, so it can automatically update packages and restart the server (that seems a bit too far ;) ). It’s probably possible on Debian but not out of the box.
Debian also supports “unattended-upgrades”: https://wiki.debian.org/PeriodicUpdates
I actually have it set up the same way on both: Automatically install updates (and restart some services), but don’t reboot. I don’t think it was different/easier on Ubuntu.
Overall, the two distros are very similar for a server application. If you’re already running Debian on your PC, I would also go with that for a server.
One thing I read about is that Ubuntu provides unattended updates, so it can automatically update packages and restart the server (that seems a bit too far ;) ). It’s probably possible on Debian but not out of the box.
Ubuntu automatically has unattended upgrades, which makes I think makes it a popular choice for VPS providers to push (beyond being popular in corporate/institutions overall), since they don’t have to worry about users forgetting security updates. However, it doesn’t enable automatic reboots. But, it does look like automatic restarts of services updated via unattended upgrades is done, but only as of Ubuntu 24.
Another thing to note is that Ubuntu has updates that are explicitly for security, and then everything else, including more general bugfixes and program updates with additional features. By default, unattended upgrades on Ubuntu only do security updates.
Of course, both a unattended upgrades and automatic reboots are possible on Debian (same software, Ubuntu just preconfigures it), although default configurations can vary. I wouldn’t be suprised if a VPS provider was shipping a default Debian configuration that enabled automatic upgrades.
On Debian, for the most part, ALL updates are only for security issues or severe bugfixes (program crashes or the like). Debian, for the most part, doesn’t do minor bugfixes at all, or do program feature updates. I prefer this model, since it’s easier to manage than having separate types of package updates. It ensures absolute stability, a guarantee that the system tomorrow will behave the same as it did yesterday, while still enabling automatic security updates. This model is ideal for a server I don’t want to babysit, or for your grandpa who loses his mind when the button he is supposed to click was moved one spot over.
In addition to that, I like the policy of automatic reboots. With the stable, slow moving nature of both distros, it’s safe to automatically reboot to ensure that kernel vulnerabilities, or vulnerabilities in other critical systems are fixed. Automatic updates and reboots can be the difference between someone being able to escape a docker container or someone not being able to.
There is one thing to note, is that adding additional repos (or PPA’s which technically you aren’t supposed to work on Debian), can be dangerous, and you have to be careful: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian/#Don.27t_make_a_FrankenDebian
The main problem is that if a third party repo and Debian provide the same package, and the system is configured to prefer the third party repo, then you can be installing a potential dependency to the rest of your system that isn’t actually tested against your system, or compatible.
You have to be really careful to ensure that the programs in the repo are actually built and designed for your system, and also that the your system does not default to installing them.
Third party repos also break the guarantee of stability that automatic updates depend on. Third party repos don’t have a separate security channel, so Ubuntu will probably avoid touching them, even if critical security fixes are needed. Debian will update them, but unlike Debian’s packages, the overall program updates won’t be guaranteed to be behave the same due to potential major/minor version changes.
For example, if you get Docker from docker’s repo instead of Debian’s/Ubuntu’s, now your version of docker can no longer auto update and receive potential security fixes safely.
Overall, I prefer Debian but Ubuntu is fine. If I was in an environment that used Ubuntu already, I would also just use Ubuntu. If you are already using Debian, then Debian is probably preferable.
or for your grandpa who loses his mind when the button he is supposed to click was moved one spot over
Ouch! /s LOL There is something to be said for order and consistency. I don’t wig out, but I do like everything in it’s place. I like apps to open up in a certain spot on the screen consistently, etc. Over all, a great explanation.
ubuntu just feels like debian with unwanted mods on top. if some specific proprietary sw you need only support ubuntu officially then ubuntu’s the better choice, but if not i see no reason to use it tbh
Choose Debian. Real secret reason? Debian means you have to upgrade to new versions less. Ubuntu LTS lasts as long as Debian (5 years) but they crank out a new LTS every 2 years. If you have 3rd party sources, I’ve run into they only support the two latest LTSes - well you have one year left on your 5 year support… but do you really? And now you can put on your sad face because you get to do two LTS upgrades. All while Debian was over there on one version and everyone will target that one version and its previous version no problem.
Debian just makes better sense for a server.
(And Ubuntu is stupid with its “ooh extra patches just register your machine with our central authority” ok bud my Debian machine just says I have mail for some reason every time I boot it up, it doesn’t make it weird and gimmicky and based on a “free” deal that could change whenever they want to jerk you around)
Yeah, I would go with Debian for sure.
Although… I’m experimenting with Fedora IoT (the name might be misleading) for my server OS right now…
