I personally favour Alpine Linux for its minimalism, but Devuan or Debian are fine, and more familiar choices, too. Depending on what you intend to run, especially appliance-like things, OpenBSD might be a good alternative.
this post was submitted on 07 May 2026
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Debian & Alma of course!
Professional as in an organisation? You should probably start by gathering functional and non-functional requirements from stakeholders.
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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
Alpine.
If you are choosing between Fedora and Debian, definitely go with Debian. Fedora evolves too rapidly for professional use, and its administration requires excessive effort.
What's failed about their newest release ?
Mostly the uutils.
- MIT license isn't nice.
- They have way more CVEs than the core utils they replace.
- They don't have feature parity yet, so if you use some rare flags in your scripts, those will break.
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Dno, I don't use Ubuntu. Just heard from all my Linux sources (podcasts, forums, etc) that their Newest release sucked.
LOL, you could hear that about pretty much every release of any software.
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I've used rocky Linux on a couple of boxes and it's been very good to me though I've since rationalised everything to Debian for the sake of simplifying my setup.
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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.
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I think there are many right answers, and in the end it's dependent on your personal likings. I am self-hosting using Fedora, and I couldn't be happier.
how common is ubuntu on servers?
At my workplace 95% is running ubuntu. Those servers that doesn't, are running crappy Microsoft server, and those are just because the applications weren't yet running on linux, but everything does now, so I gues they will switch to ubuntu very shortly.
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Professional Server grade distro, would probably be either Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or OpenSUSE Enterprise Linux.
For my personal homelab server I run Arch Linux, but I wouldn't do it in an enterprise.
openSUSE is sadly not an option at scaleway. Otherwise it wasn't a choice xD
arch linux btw