I’ve been hearing about it a lot over the last few days, but I don’t exactly understand what’s going on. What’s going on with Red Hat, and how does it affect Linux users?
I’d also like to know what people are using server side instead. Debian?
That’s what I use, but I’ve been thinking of switching to Fedora due to Canonical’s insistance on snaps. Snaps just seem to give me trouble.
Snaps are a nightmare. I’ve been using a VNC based remote setup for ages for our online training. In the latest ubuntu LTS there’s a bug where applications installed via snaps don’t trigger the appropriate cgroup permissions when running under VNC so you can’t launch any of those applications. The bug is reported, verified and well described but no one from Canonical seems to be interested in applying a fix. I’ve ended up having to install a browser from the main Firefox site because I literally can’t get the snap installed version to run any more.
I was a big Ubuntu Server fanboy until relatively recently. A couple years ago I shifted all my infrastructure into Docker, I don’t run anything on my host machines anymore besides the Docker daemon, a few random cron jobs, and a sendmail configuration.
Because of that, I’m switching to Alpine Linux on all my servers. I realized the only thing my machines do is operate as Docker hosts, so why should I carry around the weight of a fully fledged Ubuntu Server install? Alpine’s package repo is very good and you can install all the utilities you want (ZFS, SMBD, Btop, etc.) with a single command. It’s also a lot easier to maintain my host because there’s a lot less to break between versions and less packages to update.
I’ve also been using Ubuntu server, but I have some regrets. I might start using Fedora on the newer machines and see how it goes, or openSUSE.
I use Fedora and really like it. The only drawback for me is using podman instead of docker as some containers like mailcow don’t have that 1:1 parity that podman boasts, but I do have roughly 30-40 containers running in podman without issues.
For Mailcow and Kasm I spun up dedicated Debian or Ubuntu servers to serve them up.
