Gentoo vs. Debian for server???

[Tony0945]

tld, Devuan, the systemd-free fork of Debian?

Clients! I've had them specify the compiler even if they don't know what a compiler is!
Be grateful they're not specifying Win10.

[swirling_vortex]

If you're willing to step outside of Linux, you might want to consider FreeBSD. They also have an excellent handbook and the kinks seem to have been worked out of pkgng, so you don't need to compile programs from source if you don't want to. The only issue is that there's no Xen support, but FreeBSD has its own hypervisor called bhyve.

[vaxbrat]

Something that hasn't been mentioned yet is the fact that RedHat/Centos is what the commercial hardware/software vendors support above pretty much anything else. At work we do a lot of embedded development, hardware design and even custom ASIC designs. The Curtis Wrights, Wind Rivers, Xilinxes and Mentors of the world charge big bucks for their products and a goodly amount for support.... Support which only works for a certain range of o/s platforms and versions. Right now, RHEL 6.x is the 800lb gorilla in this world and you forget to mention that you might be running things on Centos instead when you make that support phone call.

That being said, I have yet to see any of these vendors go to rhel 7.x. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years as the systemd trainwreck continues to unfold.

The trouble with RHEL/Centos is that the versions of too many things are stuck back too far. 6.x is still stuck on Python 2.6. 7.x is stuck on Python 2.7.5. Python 3.x is nowhere in sight unless you build it yourself. 6.x toolchain is back on gcc 4.4.x and thus you are unable to work with C++11 standards unless you either build your own from source of go with "technology preview" flavor rpm's which will probably invalidate your support contracts with your third party vendors.

RHEL/Centos is very Gnome/gtk centric to the detriment of QT fans. Even 7.x still has some ancient version of qt 3.3 out there for some bizarre reason. What you do get for QT4 and PyQt4 is laid out in a crazy fashion. QT5 and PyQt5 are nowhere to be found. KDE is stuck back on an older 4.x (4.10 iirc for 7.x) and they have conveniently left out kdm for those of us who would rather kick the gnome 3 version of gdm to the curb for being too stupid, err, "streamlined".

They haven't even cracked into kernel 4 for 7.x yet. If you take a look at the ceph users mailing list (a product that Redhat owns), you will probably see more servers based on Ubuntu than rhel/centos. These folk probably don't want to resort to FUSE to mount their CephFS filesystems because the kernel code is too old to support newer versions of Ceph. Also the latest versions of ceph (newer than Hammer) require 7.x and systemd support on centos/rhel. There's been a fair amount of heartburn with the systemd support in Infernalis and now Jewel because of problems with the services files and ceph-deploy.

[tlhonmey]

I've got about 12 Gentoo machines I manage for people, and the amount of maintenance can be quite low.

Set up a cron job to notify you of the output of glsa-check daily. That way you know when there are critical security issues that need addressing. For most of mine I don't even worry about anything else.

If the system gets its dependencies in a a bunch and won't update, I've found that the majority of the time it only needs either to be told which half of the circular dependency to do first (which is pretty easy to pick out once you wrap your head around the syntax the report uses) or some of the core system stuff is way out of date (in which case you unpack the latest stage3 into a chroot and use quickpkg to make binpackages of everything that's having an issue. Stuff them into your $PKGDIR and tell emerge to use binpackages if available and the conflicts often evaporate.)

My maintenance time for all 12 machines generally comes in at one or two hours a month. Occasionally there's some dependency snarl that takes a little while to untangle, but if you don't have big, complex desktop environments and other horribly hairy things on the system, dependencies tend to be quite simple and straightforward. (The one exception is Perl, and there are whole threads on this forum dedicated to how where to hit it with the meat cleaver to make it behave itself.)


Basically, with Gentoo, you'll have regular, minor update issues that are easy to fix. With most binary distros you'll have one issue every year or two, but they'll require a lot of work to sort out and/or a reinstall. Take your pick of whichever model suits your needs the best.

[Zucca]

Phew... I'm now glad I chose Gentoo on my server. I was, at first, considering CentOS. But if it isn't made flexible I'm glad I didn't chose it. Although CentOS should be very stable assuming you "follow the rules".

For a general server you might also look at NetBSD or FreeBSD. Maybe OpenBSD too... but with it, get used to explicitly allow every action you want to make. That's what I've heard. So no. I have no Experience with OpenBSD. I've used FreeBSD shortly and may use it again to revive my old laptop.

Anyway I'm not encouraging the use of BSDs, but rather as an option for you to look and see if they fit for your needs.
_________________
..: Zucca :..
Gentoo IRC channels reside on Libera.Chat.
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[kohina]

[augustin]

[kohina]

[Amity88]