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
    30·
    1 year ago

    A lot of people are saying Debian, because Debian.

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

  • Genrawir@lemmy.world
    22·
    1 year ago

    Debian netinst. The network installable iso is much smaller than the full image as you only download stuff you actually want to install. Ubuntu used to have a mini.iso but sadly they got rid of it AFAIK.

  • butter@midwest.socialEnglish
    20·
    1 year 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

  • Fjor@lemm.ee
    15·
    1 year ago
    • OpenSuse
    • Debian
    • Alpine

    Would be the three I'd choose from atleast.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    13·
    1 year 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.

  • ptman@sopuli.xyz
    11·
    1 year 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.

    • flashgnash@lemm.ee
      3·
      1 year ago

      Using NixOS for my server. Makes self hosting a breeze because there's built in config options for most services I've tried to setup

  • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
    8·
    1 year 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
      2·
      1 year 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.

  • danielfgom@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 year 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.