The ONLY OS that you need for your home lab...

Arch, Debian and Fedora. For home lab beginners (or even long time home labbers) the choice of which linux distro to use for a given project can some times be the hardest part. There's thousands of different options each with their own set of pros and cons. That being said, there truly is one OS that has worked flawlessly for all of my projects while being resource efficient.

My Experience

I run a vast variety of different home lab servers each one serving its own unique purpose. I have tried countless operating systems on them trying to tailor each server to its use case. The problems I kept running into were the following:

• I found it annoying to manually SSH in after setup via password and transfer my key to the server then disable password auth.
• I'll often repurpose laptops as servers and I did not like needing to seek out drivers and manually install each one.
• Lastly I wanted to be able to have a reliable OS that wouldn't give out on me while not having ancient packages.

These were challenges that I faced for a while and I would chalk them up to being just the "Linux experience". Then I decided to do something that most Linux users would look down upon. Yes that's right I installed Ubuntu. I was never one to hate on Ubuntu or its users. I think it is a fantastic OS. The reason that I gathered that many don't like it is that it comes pretty pre setup out of the box. But I digress that is an argument for another day.

I ended up installing their other operating system, Ubuntu Server. Canonical's server operating system is an impressive OS built on top of Debian. I found it to be better than Debian for server use cases for a few reasons:

• The performance difference was not noticeable at all. I ran the exact same software with the exact same configuration on both pure Debian 12 and Ubuntu server and noticed literally no difference. I put them to the test by running each on a laptop with only 6gb of RAM and an Intel Pentium 2020M clocked at 2.40 GHz.
• The install process was by far the most straight forward and comprehensive that I have found for any server OS. Want to import an SSH key(s)? Get them directly from your GitHub account with just your username. Sick of spending hours trying to find that driver for the 10 year old wifi card or GPU in your laptop/server? Check the "Look for 3rd party drivers" box on one of the first screens that shows up.

Now I'm sure it can't be that hard to do all that on good old Debian, however Ubuntu's package repository also includes newer packages that are still tested for stability. Canonical also releases LTS versions more often. If you want newer packages on Debian you would have to use Trixie (AKA Debian 13) which is still in testing or use Debian's Sid repo, which I use as my main OS on my PC. However in a server setting it is significantly slower than Ubuntu server.

Roughly ~34% of websites powered by Linux run Ubuntu server as of 2024 (Source: truelist.co).

While Ubuntu as a Desktop OS may be more beginner friendly and users may eventually grow out of it, their server operating system is extremely easy to setup and delivers fantastic performance, even on older hardware.