Linux

Slackware, be bold.

Github has zero 9's so at this point just use Arch for everything fuck it

(I would personally recommend Debian)

Debian is a great pick. It's stable and has a great support community.

Both Debian and RHEL-like distros are solid choices. Both are super stable. Debian tends to not always have the newest packages, so if you want that I'd steer away from Debian. Personally I use Rocky Linux for my servers. It's based on RHEL, meaning each new major version benefits from Red Hat's 10 years of software support. Debian (and derivates) have better community support I think, but RHEL has very solid documentation (which for the most part applies directly to Rocky, Alma etc.)

Here's a great article outlining the differences between Alma and Rocky.

But for something simple like running a Go application, both should work just fine, so choose what you're most comfortable with.

Rocky is available at Scaleway too.

Denian Stable. It just works.

DEBIAN

Professional as in an organisation? You should probably start by gathering functional and non-functional requirements from stakeholders.

Debian or Fedora

I personally go with Fedora Server with automatic security updates.

I usually have Debian on all my servers for stability, and run almost everything inside containers for convenience. The few things that run directly in Debian are nginx for reverse proxying to container services, fail2ban+firewall, and wireguard for everything that moves data between servers/computers/devices I own

Rhel if you are using professionally. Their enterprise support staff are wizards when it comes to finding the cause of random issues.

Do yourself a favor and go with Nixos. Dive head first into to the rabbit hole and set up a repeatable and immutable system. You'll thank yourself later when so many maintenance tasks become a GitOps workflow: update config, commit, push, build, deploy, rollback if it fails

Alpine.

debian, but i prefer devuan personally

Depends on what you mean by professional and your needs.

Debian (stable) is rock solid but (because) slow changing, if your application is slow (or not) changing it's probably the better choice, but if you need new things before it's ready for a new version it'll be pain. It's the professional sysad's choice because they'll likely not have to do anything.

Fedora is faster moving (think cutting edge, not bleeding edge (e.g. Arch) as opposed to Debian's blunt safety) so if you're in active development it's likely a better choice. It is also sort of the testing arm for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is the quintessential professional Distro, so you'll learn some of that along the way.

Hannah Montana Linux

I'd go with Debian but it's just a personal preference. I had some difficult to set up a samba server the other day in one of my laptops that was running fedora because of firewall configs that I don't use in Debian like adding context or something. Besides that, I kinda think dnf is better than apt in some ways but still use Debian on my home server. I just works

SME here, moving around 300 vms from Rocky to Debian.

But your question is really too vague. Our workflows are quite traditional, but the world is a big place and there is no single right answer here.

How did Ubuntu fail their newest release?

My first choice would still be Ubuntu, however if you don't like them RHEL is available for free for homelab's by jumping through some hoops.

Might also take a look at NixOS. Been running it for a while with no issues.

Rocky and Alma Linux are both Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Professional? And you're just switching vendors because you "want to"?

I would use Ubuntu LTS (free) or Redhat Enterprise Linux. If paying is not an option, some RHEL derivate would probably also work.

Care to elaborate how Ubuntu failed newest release?

I’ve seen mostly RHEL in professional server environments.