I use Debian as my daily driver, but I’m still a newbie. I would like to selfhost a few apps, initially on a VPS, but I will probably move to a local PC once I diagnose what is broken with my old computer.

The guides at https://selfhosting.sh/ always recommend Ubuntu Server LTS for newbies, but Ubuntu seems to have bad PR and I already run Debian on my home PC. On one hand, I am a newbie and I guess Ubuntu might be easier to set up and maintain. Though, I don’t HOW exactly? On the other hand, if I have Debian on my home PC and on my server, they are the same system, so I’d be learning the same system at two places and with two usage scenarios. But it might be easier to make mistakes on Debian…?

What is your opinion/recommendation?

  • TeaWithDani@lemmy.worldEnglish
    131·
    18 hours ago

    Ubuntu’s “reputation” is nonsense. It’s a great distro for servers. Security updates are really fast and using snaps in a server environment is really great. I recommend running things like Docker or Tailscale off snap. They will revert to a previous image if an update fails. Extra stability for a server as you run automatic updates. If you run everything that is not in the base install off a snap, you have an extra layer of sandboxing against any supply chain attack for dependencies.

    Ubuntu will have more recent packages, that doesnt really matter in a server environment. Debian is otherwise fine, I just dislike it’s installer and prefer Ubuntu’s. I found it easier to sync third party drivers on Ubuntu.

    Ubuntu Pro gets you livepatches for kernal issues, which may be worthwhile. Also done without rebooting.

    Ubuntu also gives you better apparmour default profiles on more things, whereas on debian, its up to you to set them up.

    Debian will be exactly the same, its just more conservative and has less of those extras I mentioned. May be marginally lighter on resources for that. Either are fine.

    • nitrolife@hikki.teamEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      SNAP also doesn’t work well with old hardware because of compression. It’s ironic to recommend system riddled with incompatible compression to someone who explicitly wrote in a post that they would be using outdated hardware.

    • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      15 hours ago

      Ubuntu Pro gets you livepatches for kernal issues, which may be worthwhile.

      I use Ubuntu ESM. For their free, personal tier of Ubuntu Pro, you get 5 machines or 50 for active community members.

    • lyralycan@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      The only thing I know about apparmour is that it breaks some permissions for a couple of my machines, and I have to disable them in the container config in order for the containers to boot