We use Alma Linux at work and it’s fine, I suppose. I see two main reasons why you’d choose an EL linux distro:

1. You have (professional) software that officially supports it. RHEL’s release model makes it an attractive target for proprietary software and many vendors choose to support it.
2. You need/want very long support cycles. You can run 10-year-old software even though you probably shouldn’t.

Apart from those, it’s a competent distro, Red Hat know what they’re doing. If you want the equivalent to an Ubuntu LTS / Debian in the Fedora world, it get’s the job done. I quite like their approach of keeping the core OS stable while updating drivers, tools, and compilers (e.g., the kernel version number has very little meaning in RHEL).

Is the experience very different from Fedora?

Yes. the age of the core packages is very noticeable. The number of fully supported packages is also very small and you need to go to EPEL very quickly (at which point you’re no longer getting enterprise support…). On the plus side, it’s much more stable than Fedora in my experience.

Edit: My main recommendation for a stable distro would probably be Debian unless one of the above points applies.

That system also sounds a lot more capable than mine. How did you end up with 25 VMs?

I’m running it in a regular mATX case (Node 804) but I think you can also get AM5 motherboards in rack-mount cases.

Perhaps my recent NAS/home server build can serve as a bit of an inspiration for you:

• AMD Ryzen 8500G (8 cores, much more powerful than your two CPUs, with iGPU)
• Standard B650 mainboard, 32 GB RAM
• 2 x used 10 TB HDDs in a ZFS pool (mainboard has 4x SATA ports)
• Debian Bookworm with Docker containers for applications (containers should be more efficient than VMs).
• Average power consumption of 19W. Usually cooled passively.

I don’t think it’s more efficient to separate processing and storage so I’d only go for that if you want to play around with a cluster. I would also avoid SD cards as a root FS, as they tend to die early and catastrophically.

It sounds like Proton VPN (or its repo) is causing issues for you. Given that it’s a paid service, you can probably contact their support.

Alternatively, you can also look for the repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d, something like /etc/yum.repos.d/file_name.repo, for Proton VPN. You can then disable it by renaming it to .repo.disabled and try again (sudo dnf upgrade in the terminal). Note: This is not really a permanent solution, as it will disable updates for Proton VPN.

It sounds like the criterion is “is newer microcode available”. So it doesn’t look like a marketing strategy to sell new CPUs.

Nice, congrats on getting it to work! :) Native Debian packages are also nice. It can just get difficult if you want the latest stuff.

I used the docker compose template from https://hub.docker.com/_/drupal and mostly changed the image:

# Drupal with PostgreSQL
#
# Access via "http://localhost:8080"
#   (or "http://$(docker-machine ip):8080" if using docker-machine)
#
# During initial Drupal setup,
# Database type: PostgreSQL
# Database name: postgres
# Database username: postgres
# Database password: example
# ADVANCED OPTIONS; Database host: postgres

version: '3.1'

services:

  drupal:
    # image: drupal:10-apache
    # image: drupal:10.3.7-apache-bookworm
    # image: drupal:10.3.6-apache-bookworm
    image: drupal:11.0.5-apache-bookworm
    # image: drupal:10-php8.3-fpm-alpine
    ports:
      - 8080:80
    volumes:
      - /var/www/html/modules
      - /var/www/html/profiles
      - /var/www/html/themes
      # this takes advantage of the feature in Docker that a new anonymous
      # volume (which is what we're creating here) will be initialized with the
      # existing content of the image at the same location
      - /var/www/html/sites
    restart: always
    environment:
      PHP_MEMORY_LIMIT: "1024M"

  postgres:
    image: postgres:16
    environment:
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: example
    restart: always

The details for the v11 image are here: https://hub.docker.com/layers/library/drupal/11.0.5-apache-bookworm/images/sha256-0e41e0173b4b5d470d30e2486016e1355608ab40651549e3e146a7334f9c8f77?context=explore

Yes, the docker images don’t use the sury.org php packages (they use the php docker image).

“11.0.5-apache-bookworm” also seems to work, maybe you can try that version?

I wanted to recommend using a Docker container but I ran into the same issue with the default config for “drupal:10-apache” (aka “drupal:10.3.7-apache-bookworm”). Opening “node/add/article” results in the OOM error. Downgrading to “drupal:10.3.6-apache-bookworm” resolved the issue. Looks like a Drupal regression to me. Maybe you can also try an older version of Drupal 11?

If you don’t want to reinstall the OS, you can probably use Clonezilla: https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/03_Disk_to_disk_clone

Maybe you need to update the drive ids for your bootloader (grub) afterwards, not sure about that.

Edit: Maybe the advanced “-g auto” option does that for you.

It seems that 18.04 was the last release for 32-bit x86 (i386): https://askubuntu.com/questions/1376090/latest-version-of-ubuntu-for-i386-architecture-32-bit

But you could just go for Debian which still supports it.

It’s an Apple Silicon Mac Mini. Do you have a particular reason to think the new one is less efficient?

I do think it can achieve that while waiting for network packets (see e.g. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested).

But in terms of money savings it would rarely make sense, as you need to make it back during the time you run the system. If we assume 6 years lifetime then it would only make sense to pay $120 more. But yes, I’d also go for a system that runs regular Linux :)

I don’t have one (and I don’t want one), but Anandtech measured the M1 version at 4.2W in idle. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested I think you can also get that from other Mini PCs (e.g. NUCs).

I would disagree with idle power not being important for a home server. Most of the time, your system will be doing very little and wait for something to happen. I also don’t think a typical server has a display attached. Wolfang explains this quite well: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=94&si=zyjEKNX8yA51uNSf

I don’t have a Mac Mini, but for always-on systems, the idle power consumption can become quite significant.

• Gaming PCs can consume up to 100W (876 kWh / year).
• My AMD B650 NAS consumes about 17W in idle (150 kWh / year).
• A NUC / Mac Mini can idle as low as 5W (44 kWh / year).

If you pay 0.30$/kWh, running your old 100W gaming PC all the time would cost you 263$ per year. My NAS is 45$ per year…

It also depends on what you need/want from the machine. The Mac Mini doesn’t have any HDDs and can’t run a regular Linux distro, for example.

This seems very one-sided. Sure, the disclosure was not handled perfectly. However, this post completely ignores the terrible response by the CUPS team.

The point on NAT is certainly fair and prevented this from being a much bigger issue. Still, many affected systems were reachable from the internet.

Lastly, the author tries to downplay the impact of an arbitrary execution vulnerabilty because app armour might prevent it from fully compromising the system. Sure, so I guess we don’t need to fix any of those vulnerabilities /s.

This article is conflating terms that I need help distinguishing between. The other commenter mentioned that Ubuntu is a type of Debian but this article lists Debian and Ubuntu as distributions.

I’d say that the article is correct in calling them separate distributions.They are certainly related (both part of the Debian family), but I think most people would consider them to be separate distributions. Software built for Ubuntu 24.04 may work on Debian 12, but it might also not. For a beginner, I think it’s most useful to consider them to be separate things.