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Comment by atestu | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a good time to ask: what do people use, if not ubuntu, on a web server? Like for example for a rails app, on EC2... asking for a friend (who is me).

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In the age of AI, there are only more and more security vulnerabilities to be discovered, and backporting all of them to outdated kernels will be nigh impossible. I’d not rather make such security patches dependent on the timeliness of backports especially if it is done by a distro rather than upstream. I suggest you use a rolling distro rather than anything with LTS kernels. The CVE in the original post CVE-2026-98432 is fixed since 7.3. If a distro doesn’t offer kernel 7.3.1 today, rule it out. (7.3.3 is also out today.)

In general I find distros using old kernels annoying because Linus treats compatibility seriously and “don’t break use space” has been a mantra for many years. On desktops in particular, GPU driver improvements like https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-DRM make it super worthwhile.

As for exactly which distro, it matters less than you think. I use openSUSE Tumbleweed but plenty of my friends prefer Arch.

That is a wild take, especially consider the GP asked for a server use-case. Do you just assume that all new versions should be taken as soon as possible for all packages?

There is a balance: too outdated is bad, too eager for new versions is bad. The tradeoff that LTS tries to take is older, proven versions but with relevant security fixes quickly.

Not a wild take at all. Most server use cases already use containers to precisely specify what the server workload depends on, and can only access what's in the container. I see no reason for the base system to move slowly with proven versions. Even if you don't use containers, you most likely already use language-specific tools to lock in your dependencies. Leave these to the app developers and the sysadmin can move at any speed.

>...I suggest you use a rolling distro

This doesn't seem to be popular with linux though. It's one thing I like about FreeBSD, everything is easy to keep very bleeding edge.

Maybe Debian 'testing'?, is that commonly run in prod?

>>...I suggest you use a rolling distro

> This doesn't seem to be popular with linux though.

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

Nobody ever got fired for choosing Java.

Nobody ever got fired for choosing Debian.

It's a bandwagon effect. Though, it can also be a matter of common familiarity if you're not the only admin.

I personally use Debian both on my servers and desktops, for the last 15 years or so.

I use Rocky Linux on my web servers and hypervisors.

However, since I run a VPS host most of my customers run Debian or Ubuntu, due to both being more approachable than RPM-based distros.

I'm not a huge Ubuntu fan due to it being a very heavy downstream of Debian, versus Rocky which is 99.9% RHEL. I hold no grudge against Ubuntu, they made desktop Linux very approachable when Mandriva, Knoppix, et al. weren't.

But Canonical is too much of a downstream versus Red Hat, constantly losing standards wars. And unlike BSD (where I can understand) Canonical is a downstream by choice. It's like Sony who keeps losing standards wars to rivals.

Even in my homelab EVE-NG runs on Ubuntu.

for personal use I'd go with NixOS. NixOS "Unstable" is both pretty reliable and receives latest feature updates a lot faster than stable branches. Nix is simply the fastest to iterate with, for me personally, and having a VM or a Docker image declared right in my flake is something I love.

for something more serious than a personal project, I'd go with Debian because of their vast free support windows and some incredible companies providing extended support

I switched back to Debian.

Me too

Me three. I was surprised how same it all was. Except for the snaps! Debian doesn't force you to use snaps. This was perhaps the top reason I switched.

Ha! Ditto. I abhor snaps.

Ubuntu has been the easy default for things like WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) for my coding on Windows, and a linux VM on my home server. But I don't really like the idea of having a distro that doesn't treat security patching with urgency in the age of AI-fueled exploits. Need a standard distro with decent hardware support, low churn, and fast patching.

People are saying Debian. What are the tradeoffs? (other than faster patching on Debian of course)

Nothing really. Ubuntu is just a wrapper around Debian. If you are familiar with Ubuntu, it's basically exactly the same.

I am someone who believes ALL Linux distros are basically the same (with outliers like Nix) but on the other hand Ubuntu does use some things like it's own network manager that is not the same as Debian as far as I know. And it has a working remote upgrade functionality which I used just yesterday. On Debian the process is manual and is not recommender to actually do.

> What are the tradeoffs? (other than faster patching on Debian of course)

Older packages, but that's one of the reasons I use it. On the stable branch you will only get security fixes and very rarely updates for critical bugs.

If you need to use newer packages the testing branch is surprisingly stable (it is the base for Ubuntu) but there are a lot of updates.

I think debian is a polular choice

Devuan, it's debian without systemd. Other light picks are Alpine or dietpi. Want to get into vm's, FreeBSD for it's bhyve hypervisor.

What's wrong with systemd? I thought this boat had sailed

Debian is the only sane answer.

Well, I do use Arch on a lot of my VMs but still.

Rocky Linux. But I've built my career working with RHEL-compatible/derivative distros like CentOS, Fedora.

Honestly Ubuntu doesn't even come to mind as a candidate... Alpine, debian, nix, distroless, scratch, Amazon Linux, coreos are what come immediately to mind that I'd expect to see.

Amazon Linux (2023, or 2027 once it's out of preview).

NixOS, naturally.

FreeBSD

I still just use Ubuntu honestly

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