I work for a big enterprise, we have RHEL on all our Linux servers save for a few that are SuSe for SAP.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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My current job is all Ubuntu LTS, my job before that was all CentOS, and my job before that was a mixture of Debian and FreeBSD.
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I always use Ubuntu Server. It was my first distro 20 years ago and it's still where I'm most comfortable.
A company I worked at 2016-2022 used mainly CentOS and Ubuntu for all their servers at customers' sites
I'm seeing a lot of very interesting answers but I'm wondering what you mean by "production environment".
Do you mean VFX Production? (English not my first language so if "production" is used in different industries, well, I didn't know).
I'm new to the industry and worked for small companies that don't use Linux. But my VFX peeps use Rocky, Mint, and Ubuntu ( stronger preference for Rocky in studios).
In this context production means servers or machines which make money in a business. The partner term is normally staging: a testbed environment.
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So what are the biggest differences. Or is it mostly the same? Also thanks for the responses!
Most Linux distros are more alike than different. They'll use different package managers, have different sets of software available, have different default settings for some stuff, but at the end of the day, Linux is Linux. Once you know enough, the distro is almost meaningless in terms of what you're capable of. You can do almost anything on any distro with the right knowledge and a bit of effort. It mostly becomes about the effort at that point.
Skills you learn on one will be 98% transferrable to another. That's why everybody says to just get Red Hat certifications; not because Red Hat has a monopoly, but because their certification process is fantastic, respected and accepted almost anywhere regardless of what they actually run. As you've seen, almost every answer you got was completely different on what they actually run in production.
The only standout differences are the newish trend of immutable distros (openSUSE ALP/Aeon, Fedora Kinoite/Silver blue, etc) and NixOS, which is also immutable but its own beast entirely. These have some new considerations separate from the rest, especially NixOS. But they're still relatively fresh on the scene, so there's no rush to learn about them just yet.
For learning system administration, I think Cent OS Stream can be a great choice. Not because it offers something special than others but because it would familiarize you with the RHEL/Fedora family and in my experience majority of enterprise-servers are using one of its family members, be it RHEL, the former CentOS, Oracle Linux, Amazon Linux or some other variant.
I think Ubuntu is the most popular distro in the cloud, at least based on cloud provider metrics. Dockerhub shows like 30 million downloads a week for it regularly, which is a lot compared to most images. Debian would be good to learn as that's what Ubuntu is based on and all the major software with will probably target it. Alpine is good to learn as it's super slim, tends to be used for containers a lot.
I don't use Linux at work (I wish I did), but I default to Ubuntu Server for at-home Docker needs. I might switch to plain Debian at some point.
I recently finished reading a good docker book. They explained why alpine is so great to use: its like 16 MBs or something. I deployed a Minecraft server with it just for fun. Pretty cool. Shrunk the image a good 15 percent from a debian version I believe. Check it out if you want. Have a good one.
Thanks, I'll check it out! I honestly run into disk space issues with Ubuntu Server a lot. I'll give it a partition and it will fill up with this opaque "ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv" volume pretty quickly.
Here's a df -h on it right now:
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv 38G 17G 20G 47% /
Need to manually prune Docker and run other admin tasks to keep it under control.
This sounds like an automation opportunity. If docker starts to fill up, I assume you pull or build a lot of images. If the reason is rooted in software development, you might wanna look at ci/cd. If not, I suggest going through your process and maybe changing the routine. Like run with a -rm command. Thats what I do when I test stuff. The container gets removed immediately after stopping. There are many neat tricks. Hit me up if you need more info.
You're absolutly right, but this is about host os, not container os
Mostly cost. We used to run a lot of Oracle databases and they have become extremely expensive to keep running. So we are migrating to PostgreSQL. The servers were getting migrated to CentOS but now that RedHat fucked that distro we are going back to RedHat. Part of that deal is switching from chef to Ansible. So to save costs we are consolidating to a single vendor.
At work: Alpine-based docker containers. Flatcar Container Linux for host VMs.
Personally: Ubuntu Server. Some alpine docker containers.