A company I worked at 2016-2022 used mainly CentOS and Ubuntu for all their servers at customers' sites
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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My current job is all Ubuntu LTS, my job before that was all CentOS, and my job before that was a mixture of Debian and FreeBSD.
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I think Ubuntu is the most popular distro in the cloud, at least based on cloud provider metrics. Dockerhub shows like 30 million downloads a week for it regularly, which is a lot compared to most images. Debian would be good to learn as that's what Ubuntu is based on and all the major software with will probably target it. Alpine is good to learn as it's super slim, tends to be used for containers a lot.
I don't use Linux at work (I wish I did), but I default to Ubuntu Server for at-home Docker needs. I might switch to plain Debian at some point.
I recently finished reading a good docker book. They explained why alpine is so great to use: its like 16 MBs or something. I deployed a Minecraft server with it just for fun. Pretty cool. Shrunk the image a good 15 percent from a debian version I believe. Check it out if you want. Have a good one.
Thanks, I'll check it out! I honestly run into disk space issues with Ubuntu Server a lot. I'll give it a partition and it will fill up with this opaque "ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv" volume pretty quickly.
Here's a df -h on it right now:
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv 38G 17G 20G 47% /
Need to manually prune Docker and run other admin tasks to keep it under control.
This sounds like an automation opportunity. If docker starts to fill up, I assume you pull or build a lot of images. If the reason is rooted in software development, you might wanna look at ci/cd. If not, I suggest going through your process and maybe changing the routine. Like run with a -rm command. Thats what I do when I test stuff. The container gets removed immediately after stopping. There are many neat tricks. Hit me up if you need more info.
You're absolutly right, but this is about host os, not container os
I was working as a DWDM technician sometime ago and IIRC most of DWDM hardware (or at least the Infinera ones, as I had used those the most) were actually running on Gentoo, which was kinda surprising for me.
But in "regular" environments I have mainly seen Ubuntu or Debian.
I work for a big enterprise, we have RHEL on all our Linux servers save for a few that are SuSe for SAP.
I always use Ubuntu Server. It was my first distro 20 years ago and it's still where I'm most comfortable.
At this point? Probably Cent OS, since that's what AWS uses. It's a variation of Ubuntu. So if you don't count it as separate, then definitely Ubuntu.
Are you sure you mean centos? Centos is a rolling release of the next version of rhel.
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anyone using nixOS?
For production server? No. mostly NixOS is for desktop.
Ansible cover what nixOS doesn't in Debian/RHEL space, and it's idempotent and better than nixOS config. Unless they change their approach for server, I don't see any way in near future it will be massively adopted.
So what are the biggest differences. Or is it mostly the same? Also thanks for the responses!
Most Linux distros are more alike than different. They'll use different package managers, have different sets of software available, have different default settings for some stuff, but at the end of the day, Linux is Linux. Once you know enough, the distro is almost meaningless in terms of what you're capable of. You can do almost anything on any distro with the right knowledge and a bit of effort. It mostly becomes about the effort at that point.
Skills you learn on one will be 98% transferrable to another. That's why everybody says to just get Red Hat certifications; not because Red Hat has a monopoly, but because their certification process is fantastic, respected and accepted almost anywhere regardless of what they actually run. As you've seen, almost every answer you got was completely different on what they actually run in production.
The only standout differences are the newish trend of immutable distros (openSUSE ALP/Aeon, Fedora Kinoite/Silver blue, etc) and NixOS, which is also immutable but its own beast entirely. These have some new considerations separate from the rest, especially NixOS. But they're still relatively fresh on the scene, so there's no rush to learn about them just yet.