enterprise home linux distro alternatives

[Robert Meier]

Linuxers,

Is anyone using linux at home for business (local storage) purposes?
What distro? [centos, fedora, RHEL, ...]

I am looking for (dis)recommendations for an enterprise (stable
business) distro.

I am looking for stability (90d uptime is expected not exceptional).
Supports web, wiki, file, servers locally (not in the cloud).

I've used SuSE for 20yr, which satisfied the above, but has moved away
from business support in favor of gaming and cloud clients.

RPM-based is preferred, so that I can try a package, and remove it fully
(without pieces left by the uninstaller).

GUI admin tools is preferred, but with the ability to fall back to
documented cli tools if necessary.

I have apache2 web, MoinMoin wiki content, and python/perl/c++/bash
files, I'd like to port.

Thank you,

Bobby

[geo...@geolaw.com]

Maybe Rocky or Alma ? You should be able to enable cockpit and it's various plugins for admin

There's also cwp (used to be CentOS web panel) but I think it's now wider supported


Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 24, 2025, at 19:19, Robert Meier <eaglecoa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Linuxers,

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[Crow]

It's not a traditional "enterprise" distro, but I've been using NixOS
for all my home business purposes (site hosting for small groups) as
well as running new infrastructure at work on it. It's about as
stable as any other distro I've used, morso in my opinion with

atomic updates and rollbacks, as well as package pinning.

Only downside is it's 100% config file based and the syntax is pretty
confusing for the first bit. My other pick would be Alma as it's very
similar to what we use for existing infrastructure in AWS.

[Bill Jacqmein]

90 days is no sweat for any Linux distro today. 

I tend to prefer Debian for my servers. 

Nixos is also on my list.

Patching will probably cause a reboot need well before any stability issues do. 

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[Glen Peterson]

I'm also all Debian.  Version 12 added non-free hardware drivers, which made it user-friendly.  I use Flatpak for all my gui app installs to ensure complete uninstall and decent sandboxing.  I moved to Debian from Ubuntu because I'm not a fan of the Snap package manager (it's closed-source for one thing).  It was a little bit of work (2 hrs one-time?) to uninstall the GUI apps installed with apt and install them with Flatpak.

If you want RPM-based, I've used Fedora on and off over the years and always liked it.  I prefer it to CentOS and RedHat.

I've been able to switch my development and desktop work between all of those distros seamlessly.  Once all the major distros switched from systemV to systemD, a lot of the differences in starting and stopping services went away.  I expect that apache, python/perl/c++/bash would all function about the same on all those distributions.  Some of the packages you install (gcc) might have different names on different distros, or might be grouped into larger or smaller packages, or have slightly different default versions, or be installed in a different directory, but unless you're calling rpm/yum/apt/deb or another distro-specific package manager, they will behave about the same at this point.

Directory difference examples:
/etc/httpd/

/etc/apache2/

/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/

/usr/lib/python3.X/site-packages/

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/

/usr/lib64/

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[George Law]

LOL, these types of questions have been known to start distro wars ;) 

Everyone has their own personal choices - working for Red Hat I guess I identify more with the Red Hat off shoots than debian or ubuntu, although I did recently change my personal desktop to arch running hyprland via omarchy which then encouraged me to update my work laptop from X11 running i3wm to Wayland+Sway, so it only took me 28 years but I'm off X11 :)

Robert specifically asked for something RPM based.  Centos was changed a couple years back otherwise I would have suggested it, but Alma and Rocky have been created to replace Centos as Red Hat rebranded it to be more of a development stream for Fedora.  I think as far as Red Hat's development these days its Fedora -> Centos -> RHEL.  

I have not had a fedora install break on me in several years - I've updated from Fedora 37 -> 38 -> 39 -> 40 -> 41 -> 42 and have not run into any issues.  I started using Fedora way back when I was doing some work for Eric Wood but ran into an issue somewhere along the way and had an update leave me with a broken system.  After that I bounced around a lot between some debian based distros (Crunchbang and Crunchbang++, Bunsen Labs), then Ubuntu then arch then back to ubuntu and then back to Fedora. 

My personal choice for my home servers is Fedora running podman for all of my docker containers - docker/docker compose for a few containers where podman just does things weirdly and unexpected. I don't have a direct comparison of package versions Fedora <-> Alma/Rocky but I believe Alma/Rocky are going to be more on-par with the matching RHEL versions 

The cockpit web gui is available on Fedora and the RHEL clones although I think some plugins may not be available outside of RHEL. 

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[Brian Masinick]

George, I am really happy to hear that you have been able to smoothly navigate through the past several releases.

That's a real indication of how much the development infrastructure has improved over the years.

Neither Fedora nor openSUSE were great at stability for their development builds but I would agree with you that the past decade has resulted in massive improvements to both.

When openSUSE added zypper to improve their YAST tools that was huge.  RH has gone through their share of packaging tools.  Is dnf the preferred method or do you recommend other interfaces?

I've also been a Debian fan but in the current era I feel that all major distributions have made significant differences in their management tools that improve both speed and reliability.

Do you have test competing systems and critically evaluate both yours and competing products?  I think that is a healthy thing to do.  Often it leads to even better designs although at times less is more and effective beats 'the most'.

In any case, best wishes always.

Retired software engineer,

Brian Masinick

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[Datapioneer]

Bobby,

Some recommendations that I would make are RHEL 9, Alma or Rocky Linux, SuSE Linux (which you have already used for years), and Oracle Linux. All of these distros are known for their long-term stability and support in most cases.

Dan

[Robert Meier]

George Law, Glen Peterson, Bill Jacqmein, Crow, and all,

Thank you for your responses.

So far, Fedora, Centos Stream, and Rocky, sound like my best bet.

How do you find available packages for each?
[rpmfind.org, pbone, ???]

Centos Stream doesn't seem to be a searchable distribution.
Is Centos Stream rpm-based?
How would one find Centos Stream packages?
[use Fedora packages?, use RHEL packages?]

Can dnf search package (file list, info) without installation? How?
[se?]

George,
How would you recommend trying Fedora?
[Download dvd/thumbdrive, install on laptop, ...]
Can you (dis)recommend training/getting-started-with-fedora materials?

In particular, I'm looking to port
web server (apache2 or later)
wiki server (moinmoin or something that can import moinmoin)
chirp (radio/smartmodem programming tool)
emacs (extensible editor)
gpg2 (security suite)
eclipse (c++/java/python) development environment


On 10/25/25 5:22 PM, George Law wrote:
> ... although I did recently change my personal desktop to arch running

>> ... If you want RPM-based, I've used Fedora on and off over the years and

>> always liked it.  I prefer it to CentOS and RedHat.
>>
>> I've been able to switch my development and desktop work between all
>> of those distros seamlessly.  Once all the major distros switched from
>> systemV to systemD, a lot of the differences in starting and stopping
>> services went away.  I expect that apache, python/perl/c++/bash would
>> all function about the same on all those distributions.  Some of the
>> packages you install (gcc) might have different names on different
>> distros, or might be grouped into larger or smaller packages, or have
>> slightly different default versions, or be installed in a different
>> directory, but unless you're calling rpm/yum/apt/deb or another
>> distro-specific package manager, they will behave about the same at
>> this point.
>>
>> Directory difference examples:
>> /etc/httpd/
>> /etc/apache2/
>>
>> /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/
>> /usr/lib/python3.X/site-packages/
>>
>> /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/
>> /usr/lib64/
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 25, 2025 at 12:59 PM Bill Jacqmein <wrjac...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>     90 days is no sweat for any Linux distro today.
>>

>>     ... Nixos is also on my list.

>>
>>     Patching will probably cause a reboot need well before any
>>     stability issues do.
>>
>>     On Sat, Oct 25, 2025, 10:17 AM 'Crow' via Upstate Carolina Linux
>>     Users Group <uc...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>
>>         It's not a traditional "enterprise" distro, but I've been
>>         using NixOS
>>         for all my home business purposes (site hosting for small
>>         groups) as
>>         well as running new infrastructure at work on it. It's about as
>>         stable as any other distro I've used, morso in my opinion with
>>         atomic updates and rollbacks, as well as package pinning.
>>
>>         Only downside is it's 100% config file based and the syntax is
>>         pretty
>>         confusing for the first bit. My other pick would be Alma as
>>         it's very
>>         similar to what we use for existing infrastructure in AWS.
>>
>>
>>         On Friday, October 24, 2025 at 7:48:43 PM UTC-4
>>         geo...@geolaw.com wrote:
>>
>>             Maybe Rocky or Alma ? You should be able to enable cockpit
>>             and it's various plugins for admin
>>
>>             There's also cwp (used to be CentOS web panel) but I think
>>             it's now wider supported

Bobby,

[Datapioneer]

Robert,

Here is the link to the Centos stream download mirrors.

Dan

[Datapioneer]

Robert,

I've installed Centos-Stream-9_x64 in my Proxmox VE Server 9.0.11 as a VM. Here are a couple of screenshots. 

Dan