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Linux
Web
What are the best server OSes?
10
Options
Considered
99
User
Recs.
Sep 2, 2023
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10
Options
Considered
Best server OSes
Price
OS Family
License
81
GNU/Linux
-
GNU/LInux
GNU GPL
--
OpenBSD
-
-
BSD, ISC and other permissive licenses
--
FreeBSD
-
-
BSD
--
CentOS
-
GNU+Linux
-
--
NetBSD
-
-
-
See Full List
81
GNU/Linux
My Rec
ommendation
for
GNU/Linux
My Recommendation for
GNU/Linux
All
31
Experiences
2
Pros
27
Cons
1
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Web servers are built for it
Unless you have Windows network environment and technologies, installing most web technologies on Linux is usually pretty easy. Even there are many distributions, there are less package managers than distributions and installation is nearly similar on all *nix.
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Top
Con
•••
Issues with drivers if your hardware is not officially supported
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MightyPolyphemus's Experience
Yo Tux! Your Bliss OS rocks!
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Specs
OS Family:
GNU/LInux
License:
GNU GPL
Widget Toolkit:
GTK, Qt, wxWidgets
Top
Pro
•••
OpenSource
OpenSource doesn't just mean free, it means that more people have laid eye on the code and better security audits, so it's generally safer too. At least anyone can see if there is or not some hidden backdoor.
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Yanis's Experience
Yo GNU ! You rock !
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Top
Pro
•••
Lightweight
You have many Linux distro for server which will be lighter than many other OSes, just keeping for example the command line.
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Top
Pro
•••
Lots of choice
There are a lot of Linux distributions out there. There are much fewer BSD variants. You're more likely to find something suited to your needs that happens to be based around Linux than you are BSD.
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Top
Pro
•••
Maintenance free
Most Linux distro's, like Debian, perform all updates automatically, and don't require a reboot even when the kernel is updated.
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Top
Pro
•••
Small attack surface area
Linux servers have frequently very few ports open by default, few services behind any port, and a general attitude toward having each service run with very limited privileges. Most services running on Linux are build with that in mind. The security model for is mostly around user and groups, so it's not as powerful than Windows permission system, but simple is often good to avoid holes.
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Top
Pro
•••
Most software is open source
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Top
Pro
•••
UNIX-like
Nice, developer-friendly environment.
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Top
Pro
•••
Get works done
Get near each and every work done within the command line or terminal, it makes everything so simple when compared to any other OS.
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Top
Pro
•••
Easy to setup development environment
It's very easy to setup the development environment. In fact most of the time you don't even need to do much. For an example you don't even have to install GCC if you are coding in C/C++. Some distribution comes with JDK or JRE pre installed. Even if it doesn't, it's very easy to install a JDK than on Windows. There are plenty of free and open source / proprietary IDE's available.
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Top
Pro
•••
Isn't "locked down"
Windows and MacOS tend to restrict what the user/developer can do with their PC while Linux empowers the user/developer so they can do whatever they need/want with their PC without unnecessary restrictions.
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Top
Pro
•••
Sometimes it "just works"
Sometimes Linux tends to just work with little to no effort or troubleshooting required. Most of the times it doesn't, though.
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Top
Pro
•••
Lower chance of data loss
Linux has very few viruses. So there's almost no chance of getting infected by a virus and thus losing your data including your important programming files.
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Top
Pro
•••
No telemetry, unlike Windows
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Top
Pro
•••
Extremely fast
Can be made even faster by going GUI-free or using a lightweight window manager.
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Top
Pro
•••
Choose any type of desktop environment (or none)
Most Linux distributions support a range of desktop environments, be it plain old X, a tiling window manager or a fully fledged mammoth desktop like GNOME or KDE.
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Top
Pro
•••
Follows the UNIX philosophy
The UNIX philosophy: 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well'. Since Linux itself follows this philosophy then it's very easy to start creating scripts and programs.
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Top
Pro
•••
A wide variety of distributions available
With a lot of variety, one can use the distribution that fits the type of work best because of the many choices that are given, instead of just one.
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Top
Pro
•••
Works great on older hardware
7-10-year-old Dell laptops can run Unix or Unix-like OSes very well, where Windows would grind/drag/vomit.
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Top
Pro
•••
Familiarity with Linux is often required from a developer
Many university computer science programs are based on Linux and in any case, you will inevitably be dealing with a Linux box of one flavor or another someday, be it a server (most likely) or a workstation. The languages and methods used in the Linux/Unix environment (e.g., bash, C, C++, Make, etc.) are very commonplace among developers and are to the computer side of the discipline what the English language is to the human side of it: the common language.
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Top
Pro
•••
Flexibility
GNU/Linux handles desktop sessions differently than Windows. Users may customize their own sessions; in fact, a single user may use different desktop environments for different login sessions.
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Top
Pro
•••
Most Linux distributions are free
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Top
Pro
•••
Large percentage of Linux users are developers
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Top
Pro
•••
Package managers
You can install any library or package that you need (gcc, php, node) with just a couple of commands in the terminal.
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Top
Pro
•••
Access to really powerful terminals
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Top
Pro
•••
Lots of development tools available
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Top
Pro
•••
Easy and quick installation
Just grab a ISO file, a 20GB partition on your HDD and boom. You are ready to go.
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27
2
--
OpenBSD
My Rec
ommendation
for
OpenBSD
My Recommendation for
OpenBSD
All
3
Experiences
1
Pros
1
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Stability
See More
GregariousEpione's Experience
The most secure and stable server OS I ever used.
See More
Specs
License:
BSD, ISC and other permissive licenses
Based On:
Research Unix>Berkeley Software Distribution>
Package Manager:
OpenBSD package tools
Developer:
Theo de Raadt
See All Specs
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See All
Get it
here
Recommend
6
1
--
FreeBSD
My Rec
ommendation
for
FreeBSD
My Recommendation for
FreeBSD
All
14
Pros
9
Cons
4
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Stability, performance and administrative consistency
Simple and just works.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Inferior driver support for workstations
Lack of drivers for some modern personal devices.
See More
Specs
License:
BSD
Price:
Free
Language:
C
Top
Pro
•••
Integrated, stable ZFS file system
ZFS is by far the best file system available to date (2016), period.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Very shallow desktop support
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Top
Pro
•••
Great User Space Management
FreeBSD keeps all the services and packages you install in /usr/local binaries, configuration and libraries all in one place, so they are easy to find/backup and maintain. And you can upgrade your core system with peace of mind.
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Top
Con
•••
Bad third-party application support
Even most software that's portable to Linux will have a hard time running on FreeBSD. Sure, it provides binary compatibility with Linux, allowing users to install and run most Linux binaries on a FreeBSD system without having to first modify the binary, however, some Linux-specific operating system features are not supported under FreeBSD (for example, Linux binaries will not work on FreeBSD if they overly use i386 specific calls). You're stuck with mostly running only the free software.
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Top
Pro
•••
It has a manual
Being a complete OS it's documentation isn't subject to various quirks of different distributions.
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Top
Con
•••
Not suitable for desktop
This OS is fantasic for using on a server, but if you want to also run it on a desktop, you will find it's not so polished.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Jails mechanism
Jails allow for partitioning a system into several independent "mini-systems", a feature not found in many of the popular OS choices.
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Top
Pro
•••
Stable updates
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Top
Pro
•••
Great philosophy
FreeBSD won't change everything from a version to another, it tries to keep and maintain old tools as long as possible, and won't replace half the system every two versions like GNU/Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Arch or Fedora does. everything is stable and also pretty minimal. FreeBSD is designed for performance.
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Top
Pro
•••
Powerful ports collection
Ports provide a wide collection of software which are easy to build, install and modify. They contain recipes and patches to build various software, so you can simply run "make && make install" to build and install the software. You may also keep local patches and it would be picked up automatically. It also allows you to use the latest software even if you are not using the latest version of the operating system.
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Top
Pro
•••
Batteries included
Base system contains basic developer tools, including compiler, debugger and system utilities.
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here
Recommend
13
--
CentOS
My Rec
ommendation
for
CentOS
My Recommendation for
CentOS
All
6
Pros
5
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Large community
CentOS has gathered a large community of developers that you can count on if you need any help.
See More
Specs
OS Family:
GNU+Linux
Based On:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL Source)
Package Manager:
RPM Package Manager
Default Desktop Environment:
GNOME
See All Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Built-in support for containers
Comes with built-in management tools for containers (Atomic CLI, Cockpit) and a container runtime in the form of Docker engine.
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Top
Pro
•••
Applications don't have to take into account potentially breaking changes in libraries
Since CentOS backports all updates and bug fixes to older versions in order to maintain package compatibility across releases, applications hosted on Red Hat Linux don't have to worry about potential breaking changes in libraries they use, especially language libraries.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Built-in disaster recovery solutions through clusters
CentOS has several built-in solutions for disaster recovery. For example, it comes with pacemaker which can be configured to manage multi-site and and stretch clusters across multiple geographical locations for disaster recovery and scalability. It can also be configured to trigger notifications when the status of a managed cluster changes by using enhanced pacemaker alerts.
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Top
Pro
•••
Greatly favours stability over anything else
CentOS favours stability over being up-to date. For this reason it ships with packages that may be up to two years behind in order to ensure stability over everything else. Using older versions for packages means that they have been thoroughly tested and used in production for quite some time, and are ensured to play well with each-other. This strategy has paid off quite a lot in the past. One example is the Heartbleed bug which left CentOS unaffected since it was using a two-year old OpenSSL library which did not have the bug.
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here
Recommend
4
3
--
NetBSD
My Rec
ommendation
for
NetBSD
My Recommendation for
NetBSD
All
3
Pros
2
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Architecture portability
It's the most portable OS in the world when considering what architectures it can run on. It runs on very wide range of hardware, from toaster to satellites. This of course does not mean it supports drivers for many consumer facing products making it a difficult solution to just boot up and use when compared to other OSs.
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Specs
Based On:
Research Unix>Berkeley Software Distribution>
Official Supported Architectures:
https://www.netbsd.org/ports/
Top
Pro
•••
It's Open Source
It's open source with a BSD License, which is much more business friendly than GPL. It's the real ancestor of Mac, that is being used nowadays.
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Recommend
3
1
--
Ubuntu
My Rec
ommendation
for
Ubuntu
My Recommendation for
Ubuntu
All
17
Experiences
1
Pros
8
Cons
7
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Stable
It‘s one of the most stable Linux Distros.
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Top
Con
•••
Includes adware
Advertisers pay to have their links or software preinstalled. Like the links to Amazon installed by default in the dock.
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DedicatedChrysus's Experience
Lots of support and great for servers
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Specs
OS Family:
GNU/Linux
Based On:
Debian Stable(core) Testing/Unstable(universe/multiverse)
Package Manager:
Debian Package Manager, Snap Store
Default Desktop Environment:
GNOME
See All Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Company behind it
This means that the system must run well, otherwise they will lose money. There is no better incentive!
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Top
Con
•••
Extremely un-customizable
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Simplicity
Ubuntu is designed to be used by everyday people. Because of that, Ubuntu has tried hard to make a user interface that's intuitive and looks pleasant and clean.
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Top
Con
•••
Canonical does not respect Ubuntu users' preferences
In 2012 it became impossible in Ubuntu to move the close-window-button back to the upper-right corner of the window, where it always was before. To the questions of their users Canonical replied that they know better than users where it would be convenient for users to have the close-window-button.
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Top
Pro
•••
Lots of support
As the most popular Linux distribution, there's a wide range of sources for support online if you ever need help, including the Ubuntu Wiki, Ubuntu Forums and the Ask Ubuntu Stack Exchange site.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Unstable
Some people pointed out that updating Arch is a high risk affair. And one should carefully read forums before doing it. The same is true about Ubuntu. Making system updates (like it was with 10.04 to 11.04) that screw so many things up became a routine. Even LTS releases should not give confidence that it will work.
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Top
Pro
•••
Package Download Manager(APT) efficiently resolves package dependency
Most managed package manager.
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Top
Con
•••
Canonical (author) is proprietary
Canonical is focused on making money so you can see many proprietary offers by them and the OS has built-in trackers (Amazon).
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Long-lived
One of the longest maintained and most trusted Debian based distributions available.
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Top
Con
•••
Custom PPAs required for most software
To get the most software available, user must add several PPAs to the system. That has major problems: 1) Terminal recommended for adding a PPA, which can scare away users 2) A PPA can potentially distribute malware by creating a "newer" version of a package than available in other PPAs, such as the Linux kernel. 3) PPAs must be recreated and re-added with every major system update
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Top
Pro
•••
Perfect for collaboration on open source projects
This is probably the best option when collaborating on open source projects in hardware. This is mostly because packages and tools are readily available via software center.
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Top
Con
•••
Relatively high system requirements
The default GNOME desktop environment is a resource hog which requires hardware accelerated graphics rendering in order to run smoothly, making out of the box Ubuntu unsuitable for low end systems and older hardware. Even mildly aged hardware, you'll get far better performance out of a lighter desktop environment like LXDE or XFCE.
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Top
Pro
•••
Just works out of the box
Lots of support for hardware, lots of pre-installed software, and a smooth install process means less time downloading drivers, less time digging through configuration files, and less time deciding on software to use just to get up and running. It also means less time digging through forums looking for support.
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FREE
Recommend
8
5
--
illumos
My Rec
ommendation
for
illumos
My Recommendation for
illumos
All
5
Pros
4
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Open Source
Illumos is completely free and open source.
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Specs
OS Family:
UNIX (Solaris)
Top
Pro
•••
ZFS file system
illumos uses ZFS as its file system. ZFS is also a logical volume manager besides being a combines file system. The main features of ZFS include: protection against data corruption, data compression, checking continuous integrity, high storage capacities support etc...
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Top
Pro
•••
Zones
Zones provide an isolated environment to run applications in. Processes that run in zones are prohibited to interfere or monitor any other activity in the system.
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Top
Pro
•••
Performance analysis and troubleshooting
illumos uses DTrace for performance analysis and troubleshooting.
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Recommend
4
4
--
OpenMandriva
My Rec
ommendation
for
OpenMandriva
My Recommendation for
OpenMandriva
All
6
Experiences
1
Pros
5
Top
Pro
•••
Easy to use
No steep learning curve, but still provides all power tools.
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InsightfulTezcatlipoca's Experience
By far the best operating system I've ever used. It "just works", and has all the "latest and greatest" stuff. It's usually at least a few months ahead of Fedora, Ubuntu or the likes.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Almost always has the latest versions of components
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Top
Pro
•••
"Just works"
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Top
Pro
•••
Open Source
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Top
Pro
•••
Free
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0
Recommend
1
--
GNU/kFreeBSD
My Rec
ommendation
for
GNU/kFreeBSD
My Recommendation for
GNU/kFreeBSD
Hide
Get it
here
Recommend
1
1
--
Windows
My Rec
ommendation
for
Windows
My Recommendation for
Windows
All
14
Pros
3
Cons
10
Specs
Top
Con
•••
Scanning for viruses makes builds slow
Compiling a project means reading and writing a lot of files. Even fast anti-virus software slows down the build time (which is almost always too long).
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Stable
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Specs
OS Family:
Windows NT
License:
EULA
Top
Con
•••
Limited in its flexibility
Window managers, startup systems, and system components cannot be changed.
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Top
Pro
•••
Windows comes first
Windows is the most used platform in the world. If you build something and need a third-party software it will most likely run on Windows. Not because it's good, but because everyone uses it.
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Top
Con
•••
Maintenance is time-consuming
Previous versions needed to be formatted ever 6 months to maintain performance.
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Top
Pro
•••
Widely used
Windows is the most-used desktop OS in the world.
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Top
Con
•••
Unstable and slow
Windows crashes often and is much slower than alternatives, especially at file IO, which is important for developers.
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Top
Con
•••
Update policy / scheduling is a nightmare
Pop-up to update your system that will restart it if you don't interact quick enough and will have to be in reboot mode, which can freeze your activity until the update is done.
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Top
Con
•••
There are some privacy issues
By definition, it's spyware. Pre-compromised OS.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Lacks package management
It is not easy to install/keep current development packages that developers need and use.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Weak default terminal
The standard terminal lacks basic features that Linux and OSX has. Alternatives to the default terminal for Window can be found here.
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Top
Con
•••
Most software is closed source, including the operating system itself
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Top
Con
•••
Uses more resources than most alternatives
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4
11
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