@sha123
they just mean it is as stable as the user/person (who is presumably root) configures it.
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@anon63378630 exactly 
Fedora is no less stable than a standard Ubuntu release. RHEL derivatives are more like a LTS version of Ubuntu.
It really just boils down to what the server does and how important it is. If it has a few users and is nothing special vs costing a huge amount of money if it goes down for some reason, (eg paying employees who canât work) then sure RHEL derivative might be a better option. Especially if youâre obtaining third party support from other vendors who state they only support Ubuntu LTS or RHEL etc.
Generally though if the latter is the case youâll want more than one server, and be trying to achieve high availability with a platform like Kubernetes anyway, where it really doesnât matter what the base distribution is. The reason is sometimes even datacenters like AWS have outages, in that case it wonât matter what distribution you chose.
The irony is sometimes slower âstableâ distributions have more issues when you want specific non-critical bugs fixed. If the server is a small self hosted distro, youâll probably just want docker or podman or whatever and that is fine.
Stable is defined by a point release schedule where 99% of the packages in the repos are frozen, tested and validated by a team to work as expected on that release and only security patches are applied on a regular schedule. Packages get updated eventually but at a very slow pace due to all the QA that they must pass before release.
You can choose to define stable to your personal interpretation but above is what stable means for the avoidance of confusion. And Fedora does not qualify as such.
You can pick any distro as a base for your starting point and try to change the host minimally in an attempt to mitigate breakage but at the end of the day, when there isnât a team that validates package functioning as expected to enterprise-grade quality standard, you are going to have to do the maintenance yourself when an update breaks something.
This is the benefit of using a stable distro on a server where uptime is as critical as security patches. If you are paying for a license when using any of these products you can literally call someone to help you fix any issue you have (personal or otherwise) with the operating system.
TrueNAS Core (previously âFreeNASâ) is a storage focused OS built upon FreeBSD and OpenZFS. TrueNAS is a pretty popular option among self-hosters, it is offered in two versions Core, which is based on FreeBSD, and Scale, which is based on Debian.
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An update on my situation, it has been months and no distro was working well (some wouldnât even install, others would break during updates). Today by accident, I realized that there was a motherboard hardware issue and setting the kernel parameter pci=nommconf fixed the issue. I can now install fedora server and will be trying it out.
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I was just about curious what you guys were using.
I wish to necro this topic a bit but then my free time situation is definitely not improving, hence I cant do homelab stuff right now,
On my vps i usually use ubuntu. Sometime debian too if the provider offer it as an option but ubuntu is guaranteed to be available on every provider so i just go with tte most popular for ease of finding docs and guides.
Tried rhel derivative like rocky and alma but sometimes obscure package i want arenât available and Iâm not keen on compiling from source so i just stayed with apt based distro.