Use a distro with long time support for peace of mind. This could be something based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (beginning 2027), Debian 10 which will probably have LTS support until June 2026, or Centos 8 which has a planned EOL of May 2029.

I use Centos for my servers. But it has the drawback that for stability reasons, only well tested and often somewhat older versions of applications are shipped with it. That makes some of the packages already outdated at release time. Therefore I never used a Centos installation up to the EOL date. I always upgraded well before, just to get the extra functionality of newer versions of applications.

Thanks, I'm going for the latest LTS anyway. From what I've read about Centos it's a bit harder to get to grips with, so I hadn't considered that. One of the drawbacks of the Mint version I've been using is a lack of newer releases for Postfix, SA, etc; I'll probably finish up with the same situation. :(

Anyone else have any advice, please?

Mint seems to be aimed more at the Desktop market than the Servers market. CentOS may be better for server work but it can take some time to get accustomed to it and to working at the command line. Mariadb ships with CentOS 7 and 8. It is quite compatible with MySQL and there are some nice features (table types). However, there are some nasty gotchas if you are using multiple character sets. The oldschool view for servers it that they should be minimal installations (no GUI or similar). The main differences for many of the distros is the method of updating. Centos uses yum, others use apt. Desktop versions of Linux have made updating a lot easier but with command line work, it becomes necessary to have a working knowledge of the necessary options and how they differ. Before making a decision, try out the various distros.

Regards...jmcc

Thanks for that.

I'm happier wirh gui, although I use the command line quite a bit. And I need a gui editor for various reasons for mail and web.

CentOS I've considered briefly and rejected as too long a learning curve - I need to get things up and running before April, starting around late January, and what with other tasks I do not have the time for it.

I've used MariaDB on a Manjaro OS for web and I like it. Not so keen on dBeaver but it's probably improved since I used it, a couple of years ago.

Ubuntu is the likely candidate now, though I'm still wondering about Debian.

To save a couple of month's VPS fees I may set up a VPS on my Manjaro m/c to set up the initial mail server, just to get back into it; I've been running postfix for a long time but the last installation was several years ago and it's moved on a bit since then.

> CentOS 7 and 8

I've just read an article at ItsFoss under the heading "IBM’s Red Hat Just Killed CentOS as we Know it: With CentOS Stream, Stability Goes out of the Door" that indicates CentOS EOL for certain distributions are being curtailed and the basic CentOs is being dropped by IBM. [itsfoss.com...]

Apart from that, I have issues with Ubuntu, which now forces snaps as mandatory for some applications; and with Mint 20, which I never managed to get working properly (but does not by default use Snaps/Flatpack). Does anyone know if snaps and/or flatpack is mandatory on debian? I can't find anything online to indicate this. I will try Mint again in a vps but am wondering if debian would be a good alternative.

Yes, Red Hat they effectively retracted the Centos 8 version overnight, by changing the EOL time from 2029 to december 2021. Centos 7 will now be the last in line where full updates will stop at the end of this year, and maintenance updates will be published until June 2024. If you want to choose something long-term for a new production server, this is definitively not the way to go.Just a week ago, I recommended it in this thread :(

Big company == rubbish; :(

Reading up on the CentOS fiasco I found a suggestion to use FreeBSD. Had a look at their web site yesterday; a possibility but not sure how easy it is to update to new releases. A rolling release such as Arch may be better? Not sure; I understand it's more difficult to set up, even with manjaro experience.

The only apt response rhymes with "clucking bell".

Regards...jmcc

I’m biased :)

I’ve been using Debian for my servers since v3.0 Woody (2002) so eighteen years and counting. The common complaint/description of Debian is dull, behind the times, stable. Stable is what I like in a server.

Other options include Rocky Linux [theregister.com] by the originator of CentOS: proposed to be the bug for bug equivalent :)

and perhaps the easiest most comfortable transition (according to friends who consider both me and Debian stodgy) openSUSE.

Bluntly, any software tied to corporate enterprise is hostage to fortune.

Rocky Linux currently only consists of a README file and a static website. I wouldn't bet my fortune on it for a deployment of any production server in the near future.

FreeBSD is rock-stable, has been here for a long time, and will be here for a long time, but it is a totally different beast from Linux. If you are looking for a low learning curve solution, skip this one. But if you need top-notch network performance, security and stability this might be your best bet.

Thanks, guys. Options noted.

Within the next month I will run up (locally) a couple of VPS and check out Debian and FreeBSD. I know both are frequently used for postfix and apache. OpenSUSE I looked at a while back and have read some comments against it. Rocky - not a good name!

If I set up a local VPS completely with mail and apache, would an iso of that be installable on another (online) vps or (presumably) I'd have to reinstall the online VPS using just an OS iso and rebuild from there?

Incidentally, someone has offered to fork CentOs, with at least a couple of designers apparently interested.

Moving VPS images is often not possible. It depends on the hypervisor running on the physical machine. Furthermore, some VPS providers have deliberately no import/export option for ISOs to lock their customers into their eco-system. Upgrading within their eco-systems is however often possible. So you may want to do your development and installation on a small cheap rented instance, and then upgrade to a production sized VPS, once all quirks have been ironed out.

Ok. Thanks for that, lammert. The hosting service said they would load the iso of my choice onto the server, so I'll see what they say. If they will, it will save me a few quid and the need to reinstall online. Otherwise, well, I was resigned to that a while back. :(

If they use KVM as a hypervisor it is probably possible. In other hypervisors, the OS of the virtual machine is less isolated from the OS of the host machine which makes such a move difficult or impossible.

Not sure what they use, only that I can specify my own OS.

I use Debian too.

Would there be a significant learning curve from Ubuntu/Mint to Debian

Almost none. Ubuntu is Debian based, and there is very little difference in server installs of the two.

@iamlost I find Debian trouble free.

I have not tried OpenSuse or Suse on a server, although i have on a desktop. A bit more geeky as a desktop, but I suspect it would be easier to admin as a server - for one thing the control panel works almost exactly the same way in a terminal as in a GUI: [documentation.suse.com...]

Earlier this week I ran up debian in qemu. It seems easy enough to run but I'm having a learning curve with qemu; previously I ran vmware. Haven't had much time to play but once I've rebooted my desktop with qemu I hope to gain internet access on it and really play with debian.

My current complaint about debian is the difficulty in finding the proper distro. I looked for xfce but after a long search through the site's various pages ended up with gnome, which I've never used before. Quirky!

@distiles you can probably find what you want here: [mirrorservice.org...]

Are you running this on your server or locally? I tend to use Virtualbox for local VMs. It might be an easier option.

If you are testing server use, do you need a GUI at all?

Otherwise you might find it easier to get a cheap VPS to experiment with and just use the provider's Debian image.

Thanks for the link. I'll try it later.

This is on a local desktop - Manjaro. AUR carries virtualbox and I use it on other OSs (ubuntu/mint), but Manjaro only officially carries qemu so I thought I'd get to grips with it. More complex than virtualbox but possibly KVM will be of use online.

I prefer working with a GUI. I need a file manager, log viewers and variety of editors to manage mail and web applications, and I'm currently designing web sites on-server using Kate (not sure how that will work out on (eg) debian).

My provider, whom I prefer for a variety of reasons, only offers ubuntu but will install any ISO I care to nominate.

Out of curiosity are you using Kate etc. installed on the machine you are editing files on or opening files over sftp or similar?

Directly on the remote machine. It started off as an excercise in converting ASP to linux PHP and grew from there. :)

Access to the m/c (and hence Kate etc) is SSH, though.

I remember your ASP to PHP project.

I tend to use Kate locally and open the files over ssh. Most file mangers and editors work over ssh, but Dolphin and Kate work well (at least for me) - its the main reason I use KDE. I started using KDevelop recently too.

That said, for me its not a major part of my workflow - I mostly develop locally and deploy from version control repos.

I used to work locally, too, but Kate does not seem to work as well on Manjaro as it does under Mint - another reason to run it on the server. Where I have to say: most of the time it runs perfectly with a hundred or more pages scattered over a dozen domains. Remains to be seen if it runs on future servers, although I may try to get running properly on Manjaro and use it as you suggest.

@dstiles what sort of issues have you had with Kate on Manjaro? I was considering Manjaro for my next OS for my work machine but Kate and some related apps (Kdevelop, Dolphin and a number of KDE apps) are critical for me so if they are not going to work well its not an option for me.

Afraid I can't recall now, it was some time ago. I still use Kate on Manjaro but not often, as I now develop online and only use Kate locally for occasional references. I used to develop on Windows 2000 running on vmware but now, changing to PHP on linux Apache, that is for reference only.

Manjaro has a strong KDE leaning but I use XFCE, so it may be that when I first noticed the aberration I had a less than complete set of libs for it.

In general, I find Manjaro a good OS. In theory it only needs a reboot when a new kernel is issued; sadly, that happens about once a month, a couple or three days after I've just rebooted for some other reason. :)

Manjaro has a good and well-used user forum and I get an RSS feed from it, so I get the gist of what problems there are with it. The major thing that crops up is nVidia. If you use that, read up a bit first.

I have just treated myself to a new computer for Christmas, to replace a dead one. I have already prepared the OS on a USB stick: Manjaro. :)

As the deadline for this project is approaching rapidly I have had to make some decisions.

I have not tried FreeBSD but found debian buster xfce to my liking, so that shall be the OS. I am going for two VPSs, one for mail the other for web, the latter first as it's a fairly easy thing to set up, but I may "buy" both at the same time - easier for the hosting company to install debian and the second one ready to hand when I get time.

I have not had time to fully test (eg) kate as a remote editor across SSH but this is a strong possibilty (thank you Graeme). I will install geany and bluefish as on-server editing tools anyway, with glogg as a log viewer with Mariadb and dBeaver. For the web VPS, of course, Apache as the core web app and for the mail VPS postfix/dovecot/sieve/spamassassin. And Falkon as the web browser - very lightweight although the occasional site does not like it so keep FF in reserve.

What I would now appreciate is advice on resources. On my current combined mail / web machine I have 2 CPUs, 127GB disk (of which < 35GB is free) and a minimum of 4GB memory, currently 3GB actually used. I think most of the memory is being used by the mail server but have no evidence for that.

I intend removing a lot of stuff from xfce such as libre, media apps and so forth to reduce the storage requirements but in any case the cost of storage is minimal, so I'll start (for both) at 50GB - it's easily expandable. Does this sound reasonable?

The minimum memory the host offers is 1GB. Will this be sufficient for the web VPS if I add a 4GB swap? And 2GB for the mail VPS, again with 4GB swap?

Is there any reason to go for more than a single CPU?

Is there anything I've overlooked?

I had to do a server upgrade last year and just stuck with habits (Ubuntu server) The LTS was a no brainer. A server is a boring piece of tech so the longer it supported the better. Went with Ubuntu server 20.04 LTS

Regarding GUI I actually found something out by accident that you can run X server applications from the console. This is perfect if you have a Linux system that you are using to SSH into the server. "SSH ip.add.re.ss -X" will start the SSH session with X support. You can then open applications like file browsers from the terminal. Obviously, it's laggy when compared to the native desktop experience, but useful for file management and browsing.

Another option is to mount the file system as a remote directory into Dolphin You can do this using FTP or SSH. Great for simply dragging and dropping between your computer and server(s).

Another GUI tool I used to use (but haven't in several years) was Webmin.

Mack.