What are people doing with the underlying OS and updates?

General
1

Guys,

Now that 3.10 is in the Wild i intend to build a new VM as my primary OS for my live system.

Currently running on Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS)

I note now that Debian has finally moved to havving a LTS version.

What are people generally running who are not on one of the Raspberry Pi installs ?

Craig

2

I've long used Debian as it tends to be relatively simple and long-lived. I've tried Ubuntu but I often found it unstable and contained unnecessary elements.

The only issue with Debian is that their upgrade posts are full of caveats and warnings which is very offputting. Which is why I'm still on Buster.

I run my home automation live server on an old Lenovo laptop with power settings set to minimum to keep the power usage down and the fans off. No desktop of course (well I do actually have a Docker vm with a Linux desktop though I virtually never use it),

I keep node.js current using the nodesource repo's. Similarly, I use the dedicated OEM repos to keep things like InfluxDB, Telegraf and Grafana current.

As usual, Python is the odd-man-out as it doesn't have a reliable Debian repo so has to be manually updated if you want a reasonably current version.

3

I don't think there is a definitive answer, one size fits all solution here.
On my home systems (at work, I am not doing this), I tend to have very lean VM debian systems and I run everything in docker containers.
So, I don't care (much) about the OS on the VM and I trust the maintainers of the containers to provide what is required for the app to work.
NodeRed, Grafana, Prometheus, Traefik,... in containers.
Portainer to have a nice GUI.
It is also very easy to try something new without leaving "stuff" on the VM when I remove it.
It is not the fastest nor the most efficient use of the resources, but, it is for me, the simplest to manage. Which is my N°1 criteria in this situation.

2 Likes
4

I have both Debian and Ubuntu running as servers in a VM on Windows which I access using ssh from another Windows PC (both only used for running test & development Node-RED flows) and to be honest I only set them I to see if I could. :grinning:

So far (a couple of years) other than upgrading the server software both have worked fine. I have a preference for Debian because I also run a bunch of Pi's so the systems are familiar.

5

OK so nothing really definitive - guess i will stay with Ubuntu and run the 22.04 LTS on the new VM and see how we go.

thanks for all the replies

Craig

6

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