Which OS do you use for your homeserver?

Debian for all things.

Debian

Unraid

NixOS

Proxmox (debian) on the hosts, and Debian for all the VMs and Containers.

Just nice and easy to use, supported by basically everything, and a minimal install uses like 30MB of RAM.

I also have an OSX VM because that's literally the only way you can test a website in Safari (fu Apple).

Debian.

Debian

Three HP ProLiant servers running ProxMox cluster. Each box has a VM for Portaiber, as well as mismatch of VMs running Home Assistant OS, OpenWRT, Ubuntu, Windows and Debian, along with a Windows file server that connectes to four cheap NAS running Ubuntu LTS with a combined 20 mismatched hard drives by iSCSI and borgs them together with Storage Spaces.

It's a fucking mess, if I'm honest.

TempleOS

Debian.

Stable, well documented, easy to install. I do not need anything else right now.

Debian. It is rock solid. If software doesn't support Debian, chances are it supports something Debian based. You never have to worry about an update breaking your computer. It is the perfect "it just works" distro for a server.

Debian

Synology DiskStation Manager.

Arch Linux. I am so used to it I just can't live with any other OS

Ubuntu LTS, with all my services in Docker containers.

I know Ubuntu gets a lot of (deserved) hate for some of the shit Canonical pulls, but for now, I like Ubuntu and it works for me.

When I rebuilt my server at the beginning of the month, I was gonna jump to Debian, but my god the Debian website is obtuse. After looking at the site and trying to determine what to download to get Debian with non-free (I’m unfortunately working with an NVIDIA card), I decided to go with Ubuntu. I needed a smooth rebuild process and with Ubuntu I know exactly what I’ll get when I download the LTS server.

Edit: grammar

Proxmox for the the hosts, Debian cloud imagen for the VMs and docker inside

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.

Arch because why not.

OpenMediaVault

Good OOTB customizations, works on Pi, and easy to extend with plugins (Docker/Portainer is pretty much all I needed).

NixOS

NixOS, I find the config very easy and quick

Truenas

Thought it would be more popular. I'm outnumbered hard

Ubuntu 22.04 server. It works well enough for my purposes and until it doesn't I don't see a reason to switch distros.

Proxmox with Debian LXC containers. The most natural transition from Raspberry Pi OS which is a Debian flavor

Just to be controversial, macos. It's nothing fancy, just the arrs and Jellyfin running on an old MacBook air.

Windows 7

Pi OS. It's a Pi4 after all.

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.

Currently I am using Arch Linux. I am in the process of switching to NixOS.

Unraid, mostly due to the flexible arrays.

OpenBSD for all of them.

My DIY NAS runs Arch

• LTS kernel
• BTRFS snapshots on root fs
• 4 drive NVMe array using ZFS raidz1
• podman for my docker containers

It's been working fantastically so far.

TrueNAS formerly known as FreeNAS

I too proxy my moxies, but run various OSes within them (via VMs or containers).

Hyper-V / ESXi for host. Mostly windows with some Ubuntu server.

Ubuntu LTS, but in the process of replacing it with Debian

Depends on what you want to do with it. But for most things Debian or Fedora (Server edition) work fine.

Debian Bookworm

Proxmox VE with Alpine Linux guests

I went for a much simpler approach lately as I downscaled my hardware for efficiency.

I run NixOS on the bare metal. It gives the system management a declarative approach, just like kubernetes would. On top of that, I run libvirt as a hypervisor. In other scenarios I'd use tinyvmm and cloud-hypervisor, but I found qemu way better for the variety of homelab workloads and libvirt is pretty straightforward.

Some vms have pci passthrough, e.g. my routeros vm gets a bunch of NICs directly, some have various funny network topology. Libvirt used to be a pain in that regard, but it's actually fine with NixOS because you manage both sides of the networking stack in declarative configuration.

I run NixOS on the vms too (now for the sake of easy upgrades), and I have a bit of a split between running services natively (systemd is very good about “containerizing” things nowadays) and using docker (mostly because of laziness, e.g. Elastiflow was easier to deploy this way). Finally, I have a single dokerized Ubuntu that's more like a VM (as in, I never had a dockerfile for it, it's fully stateful) running the matter home automaton bits because I gave up on properly containing the matter python stack and went for an easy way out.

Now, a word about alternatives.

I used to run Ubuntu. No more. Upgrading the OS is always a huge pain even if everything is in docker. I want my OS to be managed in a config file and be able to easily roll back to the previous state. I used to run k3s, but even though it is much thinner than k8s, it is still very much ram hungry and I just don’t want to pay for that. Besides, complex networking is often non-trivial due to how its networking works, and multus is a world of pain. I used to run different hypervisors for the VMs (kubevirt, tinyvmm, a bunch others). I went way back to libvirt mostly because it’s straightforward in tuning very specific qemu bits I cared for in the homelab. I have some cpu overprovisioning, so I want to make my quotas set up extremely precisely, sacrificing the right workloads.

I've got a homemade NAS running unRAID and my arr suite/Jellyfin/qbittorrent, and an orangepi running the orangepiOS (flavor of Ubuntu I think?) Which handles home assistant and associated containers .

Windows Server 2016.

Nah just joking, Ubuntu Server 23.10

Ubuntu server, I want to switch to debian but I don't know if it'll be worth it

I use Proxmox, running a mix of regular and NixOS based LXCs. One of those also runs Docker for simpler services.

Debian + Docker.

Host is Proxmox, with Ubuntu LTS VMs.

Nixos, brothers and sisters, show yourself 🥸

arch + docker for the services

Freebsd, but it would be openbsd if it had a better filesystem.

NetBSD

Good ol' Debian 12

TrueNAS Scale

TrueNAS Core as main OS and a few jails for the services I run on the machine.

ArchlinuxARM, however it does not matter, given that everything I actually run, runs within Docker

Permanently Deleted

Currently Ubuntu server 22.04

Previous was ESXi

Next one will be Proxmox

Proxmox w/Debian, TrueNAS Scale, and Home Assistant VMs w/(usually Alpine) Docker containers in some VMs

FreeBSD & 9Front. BSD for my media server and 9front for my web server.

Right now Debian, but I'll migrate to NixOS pretty soon since it's already running on all of my machines except this server.

FreeBSD as main OS with jails and one bhyve vm for docker stuff. And ubuntu server on a dell optiplex micro for jellyfin with hardware transcoding

Debian.

My 3 hosts all run Proxmox. Publicly available services run in VMs, usually running Ubuntu. Private services are usually Docker containers connected directly to my TailScale network running directly on the host.

Gentoo!

Ubuntu normal release running Docker containers.

Had various issues with Debian Bookworm, not being able to install the “server” meta package on one server which left me without all the basics but “apt” and issues with lost IPv6 connections that made me switch to Ubuntu

I am running Ubuntu server and I am... satisfied with it. It does what it should, no problems, nothing to worry about, stable AF (as any mature distro?). But lately I am thinking about switching to fedora server (I need to reset my system one way or another, because my space on the hard drive for the system ran out of space (it was a small drive)). I am using fedora on my work machine and I really like it, so I thought I could give fedora on my server a try.

slackware, freebsd, netbsd

Armbian with CasaOS

Arch is the best

Unraid for NAS stuff

Proxmox for Smart home crap

OpenMediaVault (Debian), it's the perfect amount of tinkering and simplicity for my first nas/homeserver

Currently Unraid, haven't tried anything else lol

Windows Hyper-V Server on the host with most of the VM's split between Ubuntu and Debian. I also have two Windows VM's that I keep out of necessity.

Proxmox on physical servers hosting a variety of vanilla Debian installations. I have a physical router running pfsense as well as two HP miniservers running OpenMediaVault.

TrueNAS scale with truecharts for my main server. I'm considering rolling out a compute only server with openSUSE microOS to leave trueNAS only for storage. I like openSUSE philosophy and microOS with cockpit seems solid on my tests. I might start with some old laptops and deploy the ldap server there to test it and remove that responsability from TrueNAS.

Debian with Yunohost.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

15 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.

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Ubuntu, but I'm very strongly considering switching out to Debian or Rocky. Ubuntu has a lot of really unnecessary cruft that I think I'd be better off without.

I use Fedora on my laptop now, so going the RHEL/Rocky/Alma route for my servers is really tempting. Especially as I'm also considering switching to Podman.

I'm currently on ubuntu and fedora. I'd love to try coreos

Ubuntu LTS because that's what I was most comfortable with at the time, now I'd really like to switch over to Debian but I'm not sure I can be bothered until I really have to, everything is working well at the moment. It's running in Proxmox.

One with Arch that runs gameservers for my friends, and another that runs Proxmox filled with either Arch or Debian in the containers depending on what it is in them.

Ubuntu LTS and k3s for all workloads (except for plex, which I've not gotten around to migrating yet...)

• XCP-ng on my virtualization host
• TrueNAS Core on my NAS
• Ubuntu Server on my Jellyfin media server
• Debian on my other server that I use for testing purposes
• DietPi on my Raspberry Pi

Proxmox with latest Debian i guess, but all virtual machines are on Ubuntu 23.10. It's just the easiest to install things on, and have a semi-recent kernel, even though I would never use it on the desktop.

I actually wanted to run arch in the vms but I couldn't find any image with the latest arch. The latest I found was with kernel 6.3.

Fedora

Gentoo always and for everything!

I have 4 home servers. 1 running pfsense, 1 running truenas, 1 running proxmox, and 1 is a cloud key gen2 for unifi that I got for free

Ubuntu server w/ zfs on the main.

Have a little atom hp home server at my parents house that uses almost no power, that runs freebsd x86, zerotier one, and kopia. Free cloud backup 😁

My setup consists of the following:

Unraid, most services I self host run in docker here. Things like plex/jellyfin, nextcloud, unifi could controller.

Proxmox, used to virtualize my pfsense after I moved away from my unifi USG router. A few Linux and Debian headless virtual machines run here as well. Had pihole virtualized here as well but switched over to pfBlockerNG to consolidate.

TrueNAS, all my media shares. I also sync my desktop environments here to have a consistent windows desktop across my desktops and laptops.

Home assistant running on home assistant yellow. Runs a few add-on services.

Ubuntu and WinServer2019 vms split over a proxmox-machine and server2019-hyperv-machine

2 each for replication.

• Alpine on Pi4.

• LMDE on recycled AMD systems (phenoms, opterons, FM2 APUs, oh and a recently dead bulldozer fx-8150).

• TrueNAS, OPNsense on dedicated hardware.

• VMware ESXi on my older workstations (currently transitioning toward LXD/Incus and XPG-ng XCP-ng with Xen Orchestra).

Arch for stuff I have physical access to. Nothing's ever gone wrong, so it's worth it for the immediate updates and consistency with my other systems. For VPS I use Debian though, occasionally the unstable/Sid branch if I really need the latest updates. There are almost always Debian images available on a VPS.

I have several servers I’ve acquired over the years setup in a proxmox cluster

A few actually.

Rocky Linux 9, XCP-NG, Windows server 2022 datacenter

Different usecasses.

hypervisor: proxmox

vms: rhel 9.2

Arch which is great, but I want to move to FreeBSD or Proxmox for security reasons

Fedora Server, with most of the services I need running via Docker.

Fedora Server

TrueNAS, and Debian

Proxmox, Openmediavault, Ubuntu Server. Mostly because I'm lazy and I grew up using Ubuntu.

Mythbuntu. It started its life as a MythTV server.

@melandroph@lemmy.dbzer0.com Good old Debian

XCP-ng hypervisor main box for my VMs, mostly Ubuntu Server but some Alma Linux VMs too. TrueNAS Core for my NAS box.

Might start switching my VMs from Ubuntu Server to Debian soon, we'll see.

OpenMediaVault

Fedora core os (FCOS) vms on XCP-NG with trueNas for persistent storage. With FCOS, vms configurations can stay version controlled and deployed using open Tofu (terraform) and butane/ignition.

I see so much Debian and no Alpine?

Rocky & RHEL

3-Node ESXi cluster with 10 Debian VMs, 3 Windows VMs, and one FreeBSD VM

I run everything in docker containers but the host OS is Fedora SE

I run everything in docker containers but the host OS is Fedora SE

Switched from Debian to Ubuntu LTS few years ago.

Gentoo because it can do it all

I used unraid for a long while. I recently switched to opensuse microos for a better desktop experience, and it's been fantastic

Alpine Linux edge

TrueNAS SCALE as host with an Ubuntu LTS VM running Docker containers.

Original I went with only containers running on top of SCALE but both iX and TrueCharts made it harder to run plain Docker Compose on TrueNAS.

Rocky, but I'll probably give Debian a try next time I decide to nuke my install

I use Linux Mint, mostly because I'm familiar with it. If I was to redo it, I would likely just run Debian.

Used proxmox and truenas ended up on unraid and never looked back.

Windows 10 LTSC

Armbian

It's like a vote, without criteria and done in the wrong medium.

Boxes that physically live in my home are mostly Manjaro. They’re also not externally accessible from the internet.

Anything in the cloud I standardize on Debian. Two distros and consistency makes maintenance much easier.

Anything in a container runs whatever it was built on because porting a docker compose file from, say, Alpine to anything else is just not worth the time and energy.

I tried to use fedora server or was it cloud? Idk but I tried fedora as a server and wanted to set up a VM but got confused. Storage pools scared me away. Will try to learn it when I have the time

Alpine Linux, everything is in containers :)