Selfhosted

40463 readers

402 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
awesome-selfhosted software
awesome-sysadmin resources
Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

what will be my next server operating system (Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, NixOS), your experience and opinion (self.selfhosted)

submitted 7 months ago by mobergmann to c/selfhosted

74 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I want to reset my server soon and I'm toying with the idea of using a different operating system. I am currently using Ubuntu Server LTS. However, I have been toying with the idea of using Fedora Server (I use Fedora on my laptop and made good experiences with it) or even Fedora CoreOS. I also recently installed NixOS on my desktop computer and find the declarativeness pretty cool (but I'm still a complete beginner) and could imagine that it would fit well into a server setup.

I have quite a few services running on my server, such as Nextcloud, Conduit (Matrix), Jellyfin, etc. and all in containers. I would also rather not install programs without containers, because 1. compose is super easy to maintain and set up, 2. it remains very clear with containers (and compose) and 3. I believe that containers are more secure. But since I also want to make the services inside the containers available, I currently have Nginx installed as a reverse proxy (not in the container, but on the system) and always create certificates with certbot so that I can use HTTPS encryption.

In the paragraph above I actually described exactly the use-case of Fedora CoreOS, but I have no experience with the system and how it works. That's why I'm still a bit hesitant at considering the OS at the moment. I can imagine that NixOS with its declarative nature seems well suited, since, as I have heard, you can configure containers as well as Nginx and with Nginx also https certificates declaratively. But I could also use a base system like before (Fedora Server or Ubuntu Server) and simply install podman, nginx and certbot and manage everything that way.

Have you had any experience with Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, NixOS or a completely different operating system for servers and what are/were your impressions with this setup? Or do you just want to share your knowledge here? I would be delighted.

(page 2) 24 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Slackware is a great, simple OS that does what it does and does it well. There will be some getting used to, but when it clicks, it makes sense and doesn't do anything you wouldn't expect. It is great if you want to use containers as it provides you with the stable, simple base to run all your containers on top of.

[–] keyez 2 points 7 months ago

I have not used Fedora server yet but like their desktop is. Currently my two VMs in unraid are Rocky Linux. Been using centos and now Rocky for the last 5-6 years and haven't had any complaints

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Do you have any reasons for wanting to switch your server OS, or is it more to learn something new? Either way is fine, but it might change what is more interesting to you.

I used centos forever, but only recently started slowly migrating everything to NixOS. I use NixOS for the OS and a few common things like VPN, monitoring, etc. For all of my actual services, I deploy them using Hashicorp Nomad with docker.

I'm not sure i would recommend defining docker containers using NixOS. It'd be fine for a couple servers, but not great for a cluster where services can move around.

load more comments