Edit: wow, this is a never ending comment section!
You must log in or register to comment.
OpenBSD for all of them.
bsd fam
How is the OpenBSD experience? I have 2x4TB hard drives in my Libreboot server (Dell T1650 motherboard), can I easily setup RAID 1 through the OS?
OpenBSD is the most pleasing expérience I’ve had with an OS. It’s fully contained and has all the tools you need without needing to install anything (eg a DNS, HTTP, SMTP servers, a proxy, a good firewall). All config files look alike and use the same keywords for the same things, making it straightforward to configure everything.
And regarding RAID 1, I’ve never done it myself, but it totally works out of the box (as well as full disk encryption).
The rom for the T1650 is weird, I tried updating mine and got no display, so I’m sticking with my old rom right now. Are you having the same issue? You can build the rom in lbmk or download the roms from one of the Libreboot mirrors.
I am currently adding support for the Dell Optiplex 9020 MT, it supports a i7 4790K and 32GB of DDR3 1.5v RAM (Non-ECC). The i7-4790K is a little bit faster, like 6% overall, but it’s main feature is having AVX2 support. This increases the peformance drastically for machine learning (e.g. LLMs), compiling peformance, and even virtual machines. It’s basically modern-like gaming computer. It’s actually the first Libreboot desktop computer to support AVX2.
Happy to hear I inspired you to build a Libreboot gaming machine! Stay tuned for the next port, you can expect a release by next week!
I’m running FreeBSD I actually like it a lot.
I picked it for zfs. A lot of the ways things work seem cleaner and simpler than on Linux and zfs is awesome with the copy on write snapshots and filesystem compression and all that. I like rc.conf and pf is way nicer than iptables and even when you upgrade it automatically makes a snapshot so you can rollback.
Sometimes I do need to patch and compile things because people seem to not know freebsd exists but that’s really the only downside.
Same here for the same reasons (although I started with FreeBSD 4.x) and have adapted to ZFS and Jails over the years.
The POLA (Principle Of Least Astonishment) when it comes to changes is awesome too.
Proxmox for the the hosts, Debian cloud imagen for the VMs and docker inside
Pi OS. It’s a Pi4 after all.
Debian
Unraid, mostly due to the flexible arrays.
Same here, when I made mine I had a whole mix of different sized drives so it made sense. I like not having to worry about drive size, as long as they are smaller than the parity drives.
Ubuntu Server with docker/docker-compose on top.
So many guides for Ubuntu specifically makes reading up on something a lot easier and it works just fine.
“Ubuntu” 🤢
Synology DiskStation Manager.
TempleOS
The way God intended.
I have just learned about Ubuntu Christian Edition.
Debian.
Stable, well documented, easy to install. I do not need anything else right now.
Truenas
Thought it would be more popular. I’m outnumbered hard
deleted by creator
Debian for all things.
Debian all the way
Second that. I’m glad RPis are finally supported.
NixOS, I find the config very easy and quick
I’ve just dipped my toes into it, but I imagine migrating to another machine to be just gorgeous…
Proxmox with Debian LXC containers. The most natural transition from Raspberry Pi OS which is a Debian flavor
Same. Haven’t had the need for full blown VMs at all. Passing through the iGPU for transcoding took a bit of time to figure out, but works great. I do have an Arch LXC container for some apps without a deb repository, though, to keep them updated through AUR.
NixOS
I just heard of NixOS for the first time because of this thread. Looked up some videos on it, and my jaw hit the fucking floor.
I really liked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y - step by step, with examples and great explanations. Warning: it’s long, but I watched it in one session.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Same here. I came for the integrated ZFS support and stayed for the declarative config.
how is nix better than debian for servers?
Declarative configuration of services and the rest of the entire system, and everything that brings with it.
- Want to test some new service, or make changes to an existing one, but don’t know if you want to keep it? Sure, just temporarily switch to the new configuration, you can always switch back to the old one and everything will be back as it was.
- Have multiple servers and want to share configuration between them? Absolutely, just import the same file from both. I have a git repo storing configurations for 10 machines and a huge part of it is shared configuration.
- Want to use one service’s endpoint (such as a socket path) in another? Sure, just use the socket path configuration option for the first service in the configuration for the second, such as here. This works since everything is a single tree of options which all the service configuration files are then generated from, so interpolate stuff as you wish.
- Checks for configuration correctness during build of the system (NixOS options are type checked during evaluation, and then during the actual system build there’s more checks, like nginx config has to succeed
nginx -t, otherwise the system build fails and you can’t switch to it) - Want to spin up a VM to test changes before putting it on the actual target? There’s a builtin command (nixos-rebuild build-vm) that makes a script that starts a QEMU VM with your configuration running in it. It’s as fast as building the real system, so a couple seconds if you’re making small changes.
- Setting up services is also often as easy as putting
services.foo.enable = true;in your configuration. And, if you remove that line, the service is gone, so you’re never left with “the random package or file you installed once to test something and has been forgotten about”. That’s the biggest thing it has over any kind of imperative solution IMO.
I feel like even if I want to distro hop again and end up putting something else on my desktop, NixOS is going to stay on my servers indefinitely. It’s pretty much a perfect fit for servers.
Everything is declared, from packages to configuration, and then I can put it in a git repo locked to versions. If something breaks on updates, you have free rollbacks. Which means you can’t screw up too much. Also it has almost all the software.
It isn’t, it’s just different. I use NixOS because of stupid easy rollbacks, which is great for experimenting in production, and its declarative nature, which is great in a server setting.
