So I’m dabbling around in selfhosting, and now am just running on a shitty old laptop. There for I’m looking for the most resource friendly Linux when it comes to idle’ing and doing nothing. As most my vm’s are on idle and are only used periodically. But it needs to also be perfomant. So just like debian… Yet…
I know Ubuntu, debian, they are pretty easy to use. Debian is lightweight, yet it’s still heavy. As I tend do make a vm for every new application to manage it easy. Home assistant, adguardhome, nextcloud, etc… Their Ubuntu’s and debian’s on idle are resource intensive against what I recently found… Turnkey Linux.
Turnkeylinux is pretty much debian but stripped down. It uses less then half of what debian needs in resources, and on idle uses litterly a few mb’s of ram. Yet there is one important thing that simply does not want to work on it, and it’s Unbound. So as I want to get all my vm’s on the same distro, that option goes out the window.
So my question is, if not debian, what are other maybe more lightweight Linux’s that are recommended? Or should I just stick with debian as comments are full of it. Or do you know any other gems like turnkey? (centOS and other old, non alive Linux are not a option either.)
Alpine Linux, 200MB in size.
Alpine Linux is not a great suggestion for someone who doesn’t know Linux well, since the lack of libc can and does lead to occasional compatibility problems.
That’s why I setup a new vm for each program, if it works, perfect onto the next, if it doesn’t, delete vm, start over if I have to… No issue. 😅 I will Atleast look into Alpine
Pretty much every distro has a minimal version, including ubuntu. I think the better criteria for choosing a distro are release management, community support, and general architecture of package management etc.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Minimal
https://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Netboot
Etc
If you want to save on resources you should use containers instead of vm’s.
Doesn’t help if OP wants to try out different host OS for containers.
OP just wants an excuse to not learn Docker, I have 10 containers running on a Orange Pi with 1GB of RAM, on Debian 11.
I do a lot of my docker on Debian, some on Ubuntu. Debian is perfect for it. Something like Fedora (or a relative of it) will be awesome too since Podman will be great with it.