Hello there lemmings! Finally I have taken up the courage to buy a low power mini PC to be my first homeserver (Ryzen 5500U, 16GB RAM, 512 SSD, already have 6TB external HDD tho). I have basically no tangible experience with Debian or Fedora-based system, since my daily drivers are Arch-based (although I’m planning to switch my laptop over to Fedora).
What’s your experiences with Debian and Rocky as a homeserver OS?
Having used both:
Debian is very easy to manage, it has the one of packages and mostly sane defaults. Ubuntu’s user friendliness owes a lot to Debian. I do not like the state of package management however. Dpkg is in need of some upgrades, and the deb package format has some security concerns.
Rocky, being RHEL-derived is, as expected, exceptionally stable. I personally find DNF to be the superior package manager and I have historically run into fewer issues with it. Repos are extensive, especially with copr and fusion, but not as good as Debian.
For a simple home server use Debian. If you want experience with enterprise Linux use Rocky.