I’m refurbishing an old PC to work as a home server for several stuff. I’m looking for a lightweight distribution to install in it, but with a decent package repository. A small image size will be appreciated, as I have slow bandwidth too.

  • bastion@feddit.nl
    33·
    9 months ago

    A lot of people are saying Debian, because Debian.

    Debian. I’ve literally run Debian stable with uptimes of over a year.

  • butter@midwest.socialEnglish
    16·
    9 months ago

    I went Debian without a Desktop for my server. I later installed a desktop for the occasion that I need it. But mostly, I use SSH

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    14·
    9 months ago

    Apart from Debian, I guess Alpine. It’s quite popular in containers for its small size. Even Arch will be much bigger in that case because the packages are much less granular and install development libraries and headers for about everything.

  • Fjor@lemm.ee
    14·
    9 months ago
    • OpenSuse
    • Debian
    • Alpine

    Would be the three I’d choose from atleast.

  • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
    13·
    9 months ago

    Debian or Ubuntu Server (or something specific to servers purpose, like OMV, etc).

    … but ProxMox (a hypervisor, Debian based) doesn’t have much overhead & runs on old PCs pretty well. And with that, you can pretty much try any distro (as a full virtual machines, perhaps with dockers within it, or as a lightweight containers that are really resource efficient). Or separate containers for each purpose (for beginners, there are like TurnKey solutions to stuff like NAS, it takes literally a few minutes to set up).

    Backups (snapshots) are easy too, and a later migration to a better/next server is basically two clicks away.

    • TheUnicornOfPerfidy@lemmy.ml
      2·
      9 months ago

      So the question I then have is, how hard would it be to virtualise my current Ubuntu server within Proxmox, both not having dealt with VMs before and having spent a lot of time on the server?

      • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
        1·
        9 months ago

        To transfer image 1:1 from disk to VM?

        Im sure there is a way (a quick search will probably give you your answer fairly quickly) … or just try Clonezilla, that way you can also revert back. As per usual with OS I would advise make a clean install on a new machine & transfer the rest manually, … however I’m lazy and wound definitely try to image copypasta the disk.

        VMs as such aren’t really any different from regular machines, it’s just that you define virtual machine parts, well, virtually (like you can add disks, RAM, cores, etc as you wish).

  • ptman@sopuli.xyz
    11·
    9 months ago

    Linux is quite lightweight. Pick a distro that doesn’t run a lot of stuff by default. OpenBSD only runs sshd exposed to the network, AFAIR. Debian probably does the same. But really, the lightness comes from what isn’t running. NixOS, fedora, rocky, alpine are all decent alternatives.

  • danielfgom@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    9 months ago

    Debian. You can install it headless and do everything from the command line. Or if you need it, install a lightweight desktop like XFCE.

  • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
    8·
    9 months ago

    If you want good support: Debian.

    Other options include Alpine and Slackware (the former is the base of many OCI compliant containers, it’s lighter than Debian usually).

    No, Gentoo, Void and Arch are not server distributions.

    FreeBSD is also pretty good, although at this point, the only real argument I have seen for the BSDs is their close-ness to Unix more than anything else. If that is something you really need, you know where to go

    • nyan@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      Gentoo, at least, is an unspecialized metadistribution that can be used for whatever purpose you can come up with. It can certainly be put on a server, but for someone lacking Gentoo experience the learning curve might be a little steep, and depending on exactly what software you want, compiling it may take a while on an older machine.

      So speaking as a Gentoo user, Debian is a not-unreasonable choice for this use case. It’s certainly stable enough.