I want to make a server for hosting media through Jellyfin, and maybe some Nextcloud functionality. I prefer to use containers, but something like TrueNAS’ extensions/plugins sound good as well. This is my first server, so I don’t know what to choose. My possible options are:
- Debian
- Ubuntu
- Fedora
- TrueNAS Scale Which one should I choose? I am fine with using either Docker or Podman. (Edit: The server will be running on an old laptop with a single drive slot.)
Everybody is so quick to suggest Debian (and it’s a fine choice), but Alpine is great for such things, as well. It’s blazing fast, frequently updated, has most packages you could ever want in a server environment (not that it matters if you’re planning on using containers). I’ve been using Alpine for years as my docker host, and not once have I thought “man, I wish it was debian instead”.
I’ve been using Debian as my main server OS for a long time, but yeah I’ve started using Alpine for lightweight hosts for a single app/docker lately. Especially on proxmox with the pve-helper-scripts you can spin up an Alpine container or VM with Docker in a few seconds.
Not something I’d want on my server :) Partly joking, their lifecycle makes sense if you stay on the major.minor release. Though I find 2 years security support is a bit short - Debian LTS is usually around 5 years, not an excuse to wait for the last moment to upgrade but I find it more comfortable than just 2 years.
One thing to watch for is that alpine uses
muslas it libc, and many programs expect glibc so you might run into obscure bugs. I find it good as base image for OCI images (again there are edge cases), but wouldn’t use it for a general purpose server.