this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
53 points (96.5% liked)

Selfhosted

40329 readers
409 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] mr47@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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".

[–] yamdwich@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

frequently updated

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 musl as 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.

[–] mr47@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I upgrade as soon as new versions come out, I like living on the edge :) if something goes wrong, there are backups.

As for musl, I haven't mentioned it since OP wants to run containers - and in that case, musl doesn't matter. And for running programs natively, many are available as packages (with any musl incompatibilities already resolved). But yeah, if you venture outside these limits, you can definitely run into issues with musl.