What’s The Difference Between All These Distros?
When you’re running Linux on a cloud server, you’re likely accessing it over SSH, and not a GUI, so differences in the desktop environment don’t matter much (if at all). While you can technically run any flavor of Linux on a server, it’s best to choose a distro optimized for server use.
One way to solve this issue altogether is to use a containerization service like Docker. Docker packs your applications into containers, which run the same regardless of what operating system they’re running on (assuming that distro has a Docker binary compiled). You can even “emulate” other distros; for example, you could have a server on Ubuntu running a containerized app that thinks it’s running on CentOS. This is because Docker only modifies the container’s namespaces, and it’s all running on the same Linux kernel under the hood. You could switch that server over to a different provider running Fedora and all you’d have to do to get your app running again would be to copy and run your app’s container on the new system.
Ubuntu Server LTS
Ubuntu is perhaps the most well-known Linux distro. It’s free and open source, so almost every cloud provider will offer it as an option, if it’s not already the default. If you move to a new provider in the future, the transition should be seamless.
Ubuntu Server is a very general-purpose distro. If you don’t care to dive in to all the details of competing distros, you won’t have any problems simply installing Ubuntu and forgetting about it.
There are a few flavors of Ubuntu Server, but we would recommend installing whatever the latest Long-Term Support (LTS) release is, which is published every two years in April. Currently, the latest version is Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS (Bionic Beaver), with 20.04 LTS slated for next April. However, Canonical is supporting still Ubuntu 18.04 LTS until 2022 with extended security patches until 2027.
Ubuntu is open source, and Canonical’s patches are free, but the company offers a paid service called Ubuntu Advantage, which provides 24/7 phone and web support. More notably, it also gives you access to two very useful services—Canonical Livepatch and Landscape.
Livepatch installs kernel updates automatically without rebooting your system, which allows you to keep your server up even through critical kernel bugs. It’s free for three machines, but anything more requires Ubuntu Advantage. Landscape is a management tool designed around monitoring the health of your system and installing batch updates to packages on multiple servers.
If you want a minimal distro similar to Ubuntu, you can try running Debian, the distro Ubuntu is based on. However, the support for bare Debian is community based, and it isn’t as popular.
CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora
These three distros all share communities, and are fairly similar to each other. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a very popular distro for enterprise servers, but unlike most Linux flavors, it’s not free. Recently, Red Hat has started offering development-only builds of RHEL.
Fedora is the upstream source of Red Hat, meaning new features get implemented and tested in Fedora before making their way into RHEL. As such, the distro will be updated quite often, and is more “cutting edge” than a stable server distro.
CentOS is the downstream source of RHEL. It’s essentially RHEL’s free version, but it’s maintained by a separate team and is independent from Red Hat. If you’re looking for a free distro that isn’t Ubuntu, CentOS is the top contender. It’s used a lot less than Ubuntu, but is updated less frequently, which can be a good or bad thing in the cloud server world.
One major note about RHEL and CentOS is that they’re the only distro that officially supports cPanel, a popular web-hosting control panel. If you’re looking to use cPanel you’ll have to use CentOS, or try to run it in a Docker image, which is probably more trouble than it’s worth for an application designed to save you time.
Red Hat is the developer of Kpatch, a utility for kernel live patching. Kpatch is free, but it’s not automated, and requires you to manually apply patches when necessary. It works on RHEL and CentOS, as well as Debian.
