My guess would be that fastfetch probably reports actual memory usage while btop probably reports the total usage of all processes. The former is probably higher because of things like filesystem caching
If you're a university student and want to learn OpenBSD administration or how to host your own blog, or just how to use VSCode, these are all extracurriculars.
For a while I used CentOS 7 on all of those small VMs, because it got security updates for a really long time. With minimal risk of breaking things on updates.
PS: after a bit of research Alma/Rocky Linux are probably the best choices for now. 10 years of support. But are they maintained well?
I've upgraded Debian stable (both pure and with some cherry-picked backports) and Ubuntu (non-LTS and LTS) systems in place and rarely broken anything, for years and years. When stuff has broken it's been a quick google and then slapping myself for not having read the upgrade guide.
I do generally wait about 2-3 weeks before upgrading, giving time for them to catch stuff that was missed until the great masses were set loose on it.
I've had issues with Ubuntu/Debian upgrades more than once. Some third party binaries breaking with the update. Or some specific config tweaks that break, because the structure of /etc changed too much.
For some small VM with a specific purpose I prefer a distribution that changes as little as possible for as long as possible. Less work, more uptime.
The naming conventions drive me crazy as well. When you deal with 2 things that have dumbshit naming conventions, like ubuntu and ROS, its really obnoxious to pretend to case enough to keep track of.
Not the OP, but I support Ubuntu as desktop and server OS for an engineering collage and have for 10ish years. Some LTS upgrades don't require many changes (mostly minor package name changes) and some take months of work to get rolled out (mostly for workstations, the server upgrades are usually quick.). Not everything gets upgraded every new OS release. If we had to upgrade everything every 6-12 months it would eat up a significant amount of time for our small team.
If you use Copr (Nvidia Drivers, Non-Free Stuff) you need to ensure all your Copr packages work fine in the next version of Fedora. A ton of packages haven't been updated for Fedora 44 and this will cause issues.
The same applies if you use Terra
For updates, Debian and Ubuntu are great. For upgrades… not so much for me.
RHEL is definitely the most stable major distribution. Alma and Rocky are essentially downstream clones of RHEL.
For a box that sits in a corner doing its joband you don't want to pay attention to it's not a good choice IMO. On a desktop you want the latest of everything on and you have time to keep up it's the best.
You've never NOTICED any issues. Which is far from the same claim...
Alma has a few affordances as it's no longer RHEL source compatible, which means it could ship priviledge escalation fixes with new kernel updates faster.
Rocky responded with an extra, optional to enable, security repo to provide mitigations to the exploits while waiting for RHEL to downstream.
Look pretty well maintained to me. If only judging by recent events.
The manuals, indeed are good, though for more esoteric issues I land too often on a gated answer page.
I don't care much about being fully RHEL compatible, or no ABI changes at all. I just want a system that gets security fixes quickly with as little chances of breaking things as possible.
Fedora CoreOS in particular has had a good track record delivering patches quickly. Like for CopyFail was pushed to the stable channel in about a day, IIRC, but the patch was already available within a few hours of disclosure in the "next" / testing channel.
Talos and Flatcar are also worth considering if you want an even smaller attack surface, from what I heard they weren't even affected by CopyFail.
ELTS is 10 years and paid. It's great that it exists, but not relevant for my toy projects.
Either the 1-2 hours is a drop in the bucket compared to what you spend on it anyway (like a blog you still regularly update), or you don't actively update the project but still care enough about it to spend half an evening every few years, or you should just admit you don't care about it enough anymore to do even that. In the last case just delete the project.
I want the machine that serves my static blog pages to have, ideally, 0 maintenance.
It needs to do one thing, serve some static HTTP pages and have new pages pushed to it.
Quite frankly I wish some of those "minimal docker first OSs" had taken off.
I haven't used a lot of different distros, but for me, Debian has been a good balance of those factors. You may need to do more upgrades per decade, but the ones that you do are more liable to go smoothly.
Just my 2¢ on the topic (:
I have been running NixOS on several servers for more than a decade. No reinstalling, upgrading, or any breaks whatsoever.
But I have had, uh, non-trivial breakages happen also when I upgrade the system itself to the next yearly release. Non-bootable kernel kind of breakages.
But I will give you that I can just boot from the generation before the upgrade, and it works again. So there's that :)
It has been the most headache-free Linux I've used, simply because I'm less scared to play with and fix stuff. The fact that rollbacks are trivial and snapshots are automatic, and since everything is declarative in a text file anyway, I am way braver. If I do something like screw up the video driver, or the wifi driver or make it so the system doesn't boot anymore, all I need to do is reboot and choose a previous generation.
Keep in mind: this was just a simple rest server. But for some reason it needed to (nondeterministically) build the word from scratch to send that single request.
I’ll take a docker system thank you.
However, I have had one machine become unbootable as it could no longer mount its encrypted disks after an upgrade, forcing me to mount a rescue image remotely, mount the disks manually, lift the data out, and do a complete reinstall (migrated the box to OpenBSD at that time). Similarly, NixOS once messed up systemd (or vice versa) so badly that I could not even reboot without forcing a power cycle. Lastly, I have had a package break for my use cases by maintainers enabling so many custom flags by default for a package that they enabled one I have never seen enabled by any other packaging team and that then broke RTSP in "funny" ways. Ubuntu did tend to break things like graphics between releases at times back when I used it, but I have never had any other distribution or operating system throw curve balls like the three things I mentioned here.
My general impression of NixOS is that the core is solid, but that nixpkgs just has such a large number of things that it supports that the maintainers struggle to test them all and can not anticipate the interactions between all the packages and options. The default Julia package being so broken that it produced incorrect mathematics due to nixpkgs' insistence on allowing you to swap out the Blas library and also having turned off the unit tests for example springs to mind. This was shipped to end users for a long time before I noticed it by accident by enabling the unit tests and stepped in to clean it up. It all feels very "Gentoo", which was indeed an inspiration for NixOS by the way.
Now, return to that last sentence in the first paragraph that I wrote about feeling empowered to tinker, ultimately, I feel like you should try to resist that urge as it is what pushes you into the untested fractal of possible configurations that NixOS allows you to explore. My other main operating system is OpenBSD, where the mentality is "Stick to the defaults or suffer the consequences"; with NixOS, I feel like everyone's box is more or less a tailored suit, which comes with both its ups and downs.
I actually wonder what would happen to a NixOS installation frozen in time for 5 years that then you want to update to latest all of a sudden.
It's very rare to find something that prevents you from directly updating. Nixpkgs tries very hard to no require new Nix features, so it evaluates with even Nix versions from a decade ago. Also, NixOS options and packages are frequently changed, but the automatic migrations (mkChangedOptionModule, mkRenamedOptionModule, alias, etc.) are never removed in practice.
Since the binary cache has never been cleared since its creation (2002?), it should actually be easy to install a super old NixOS release and upgrading it to the latest to see what happens.
By the way, there are LTS versions of NixOS, just not officially supported. See https://docs.ctrl-os.com/.
Then I figured that version upgrades were miserable, not just because I had painted myself in a weird corner with ungodly packages mix-ups, but because the upgrade path was always best-effort. I think I gave up during the 6 to 7 transition, as I realised that all I needed was fedora: with yearly or half-yearly updates I have no need to fight the distro's packages: stuff stays current and in working order, major distro upgrades go smoothly, downtime is minimal. I'm not considering going back to any "server distribution" ever.
Went with openSUSE MicroOS myself, it updates and reboots almost daily so I can be pretty confident my server is healthy and it's atomic so if something does break and I don't feel like dealing with it, I can just click rollback button from cockpit and deal with it whenever I have time.
It used to be hard to find dedicated servers or VPSs with any of the BSDs, I think I settled on Panix.com or something?
Before that I remember some company called 15MinuteServers (NAC?) out of NJ I think that offered them. Just kind of rambling down memory lane at this point though.
I have FreeBSD with Hetzner and OVH. I’ve also used Vultr in the past.
But that’s ok. The author isn’t claiming FreeBSD is way better than Linux. It’s just a comparison of what he had vs what he has now.
For example, look at these benchmarks from 2003[1]. The newest benchmarks I could find[2], [3] point in the same direction.
[1] http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/
[2] https://matteocroce.it/blog/freebsd_linux_networking/
[3] https://www.phoronix.com/review/freebsd-15-amd-epyc-linux
Note, I did try Artix, but when it broke last week after a restart (in which evidently something had gone wrong with an earlier kernel update), and I had to pull out a rescue ISO, I decided I didn't want to mess with that. I switched that machine to Devuan, but the jury is still out for me. I don't have any major complaints, but I'm still in the burn-in phase. :) I'm running Arch on a laptop, but they have been a bit hostile in the community with censorship, so I'm just waiting for a free weekend to blast it and put something else on. I don't want political drama in my software.
This all comes at an interesting time, though. This is the first time that I purchased a new laptop and didn't even let it boot into Windows, but instantly installed Linux. And everything "just worked". And now that I'm excited to try Linux, so many of the big players are embracing the steps to erode privacy (AI everywhere... age attestation/verification... telemetry on by default...). It's sad, and I'm just going to "nope" out of any interactions with them.
I've also got a couple of test systems running Chimera - going to wait until it hits stable before relying on it too much though. Experimenting a bit with AerynOS too.
You've been misled.
I use Debian now much more. With all the supply chain attacks, Debian Stable feels like an absolute jewel, even if there are always a few packages I need to handle separately because I want or need a more updated version. But I love the old school no-nonsense engineering ethos.
That's mostly problem of Arch/Artix, they're the bleeding edge, which is not always the best for stability. But no one said that rolling distro is supposed to always ship latest versions of everything. I've been using Void Linux past months - and while it's a rolling distro, it runs LTS kernel (mainline is also available) and maintainers are more focused on stable versions of apps than on faster updates.
You can put it behind cloudflare for free.
This is completely different. When it’s a person blog and a personal VPS it’s affecting nobody but that person.
Many of these small VPSs can be had for less than a couple bucks a month. Tons of popular influencers run their own machines for their blog.
insinuating that it's unsafe to run your own machine is insanity. I don't understand this mindset of being scared to run your own stuff. Especially if you're doing doing it at such a large scale there's nothing wrong with doing it with nginx and a linux box on a vps. You'll learn a hell of a lot more and be fine. At the end of the day it's a computer. We've been hosting websites since the 70's. With the advant of cloud compute is easier than every to run your own.
(edited to be less mean)
I guess if you want to call being informed about the online threat landscape "scared", that's your perogative. For me, it's common sense to avoid completely unnecessary threat vectors to my digital infrastructure, but power to you if you like dealing with extra maintenance overhead and constantly wondering whether you're providing free cryptomining to some random international criminal.
I'm also not sure that I really need a CDN for a simple blog . I'm not going to benefit from the caching as it's not video or images.
The flexibility and learning is more important for me. For example I want to aggregate HN comments and lobste.rs comments and inject that into the HTML before serving. (on the server side so no CORS or other additions)
I was considering adding additional metrics to see who is hitting the server and how at the reverse proxy level.
This is all stuff I can't really do on a github pages blog.
I see what you're saying if you want set and forget that's fine, but like I said above it's a tradeoff.
The one server I have just has 80 and 443 open with nginx. I expect it to run indefinitely with little maintenance.
I've owned and operated enough stacks e2e both personally and professionally to have gotten over the novelty. The less shit that can go wrong, the better. I sleep better at night not wondering whether any of the constant stream of IPs in my fail2ban log is wielding a yet-to-be-CVE'd zero-day, or finding out that my site has been down for 6 weeks because of some fucking stupid bug in the latest kernel patch or whatever.
You will never win this crusade, because there are too many people here who know from experience a VPS is neither expensive, nor under-performing up to millions of users a day, nor hard.
1. VPS costs more money. CDN is free for all intents and purposes.
2. VPS has worse availability even when run perfectly.
3. VPS requires more monitoring and maintenance.
4. VPS presents far greater security risk.
For 5 EUR you get 20 TB traffic on Hetzner.
There's additional concern with tying your work to something like github it makes it more of a pain to pull it off and put it somewhere else.
I'm not really sure what you mean by objectively inferior. It's trade offs like everything in this field.
As far as harder, I don't really think the lift for a personal VPS is that high. Again it's a fun hobby project for most. It's fun to run your own stack.
If you want to opt into the github cloudflare goodness that's fine they're good services but I wouldn't say it's better or degnegrate others for not doing that.
That's great if that's what you want, but you are commenting in a thread full of people gleefully spouting off about decades-old installations that they self-admittedly have “no idea” how to upgrade. Most people in here would be better off if they admitted to themselves that they are not actually taking advantage of the opportunity to learn, and are instead undertaking a liability.
If someone is willing to use something like Hugo instead of garbage sites like Medium why not use a VPS? For many people working in tech $10/month and free are the same thing.
And yes you can have preferences to keep things simple while others can make something unnecessarily complex. For personal projects this is fine and part of learning. If you had said “I much prefer… because…” it would have been fine but you said “objectively inferior in every meaningful way” which ignores people’s subjective preference for over engineering hobby stuff for learning.
On the other hand, dedicated servers are more fun, even if the cpus I get for $35/month are ancient. Is it $30/month fun? Probably not, but it's near zero given my situation.
At least I'm sensible and don't have an actual colo space to visit.
In the unlikely event I go viral, I'm pretty sure my server can manage serving https at 1gbps, and that's plenty. Maybe TLS is too much though, the cpus are too old for AESNI.
On GitHub?!
Be careful if you have anything that autostarts that reaches out
Also, debian/ubuntu systems can easily be setup to auto update and reboot on a regular basis, leaving you manual maintenance only for the larger version upgrades.
- PM2 was buggy on FreeBSD, which I used to manage my processes
- An alternative, using `rc.d` to run daemons was just so hard to get logs working.
- The firewall required too much self configuration to get it right with all the best security practices (ie. What does one do with ICMP.) I was missing something like a template with the defaults that come with UFW, for instance.
For supervision?
> - An alternative, using `rc.d` to run daemons was just so hard to get logs working.
The unix way is to use logger(1) If you only want some simple message, or redirect to files using newsyslog(8) for managing the sizes of the files.
> The firewall required too much self configuration to get it right with all the best security practices (ie. What does one do with ICMP.) I was missing something like a template with the defaults that come with UFW, for instance.
I would recommend The Book of PF[0]. While FreeBSD has syntax difference with OpenBSD's pf, this should give you enough insight on how a firewall operates to get a sense of what rules to write.
FreeBSD does include this! It's implemented using IPFW instead of PF. Check out `firewall_type` key in `rc.conf`: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/libexec/rc/rc.conf?id=8e08...
For a very easy single-machine firewall, one could set `firewall_type=client` or `firewall_type=workstation` if you want to host anything. For the latter, `firewall_myservices` and `firewall_allowservices` control what ports are enabled and who (other networks/IPs) have access to them.
For a very simple NAT gateway, one could set `firewall_type=simple` and then `firewall_simple_(iif|inet|oif|onet)(_ipv6)?` to configure the ISP-side and internal-side interface names and IPv4 and IPv6 network ranges for each.
For more details and to see exactly what each option actually does, check out `/etc/rc.firewall` where this is all implemented: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/libexec/rc/rc.firewall?id=...
Mostly ~/apps/appname, where each appname has a docker compose file, and the data directories mounted under appname... I can compose down and (s)ftp the data out for hard archives or to move a site/service. I had been running a few VMs under a dedicated server, but switched to separate VPSes on OVH. Only gotcha with OVH is if you want to run mail, you want to avoid the local zone VMs that don't allow mail hosting.
YMMV
I think FreeBSD has some interesting technical merits, but like it or not Docker is the default for a lot of open source software, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to translate everything to freebsd jails.
It's an incredible journey to take--whether you stick with it or not. Migrating to FreeBSD gives you new eyes into what Linux was, is, and the awesomeness of FreeBSD that is so hard to articulate; like describing the color blue. It must be taken as a whole to appreciate it; and I'm not just saying the OS, it's commands, kernel features, but, the end-to-end compute experience, over time.
If I could draw an equivelent, it would be like when Djistrka savagely destroyed the GOTO statement with a single, short, paper. It took a brilliant mind to articulate that and there has yet to be such a mind to describe the beauty of FreeBSD. So, the best I can do, is just to challenge you to try it.
Nowadays I build things so that they move and I have moved things about a bit so I know they work.
For a physical machine which you can't easily copy, it's a different story.
Quite. I'm old enough to remember machine uptime being a badge of honour.
However, being older and not really wiser, I look for service uptime these days. Yes we did have similar back in the day, that's why MX and the like DNS records exist.
Old school clusters were pretty esoteric but the lessons were learned (split brain n that) and that's why we still argue the toss with kiddies about why a Proxmox cluster with two nodes is fucked and why we recommend an additional "witness".
I don't care that VMware glossed over the whole two node HA cluster thing years ago with a massive bodge. They were wrong then and they are probably still wrong because that nonsense is probably still baked in.
Sorry, slight digression.
High uptime implies no patching. We all love patching.
The more you know!
>a Proxmox cluster with two nodes is fucked and why we recommend an additional "witness".
Reminds me of the three Magi from Evangelion: https://magi.kinta.ma/
One reason mainframes and micros are still around us, is that you can change almost everything between hardware and software without downtime.
It is also available in commercial surviving UNIXes, and as paid for feature in some Linux distros, although not to the extent that those grandparent systems are capable of.
I think I’m gonna hafta keep waiting...
When you hotpatch the system for years then you have no idea if the system can boot up or it will fail somewhere in the booting process.
i.e. you can only trust what you regularly test.
Not doubting it, only curious about some kind of postmorten.
or translated: https://danskebank-com.translate.goog/da/news-og-insights/ny...
TLDR: power supply failed completely and DB2 failed running recovery operations due to multiple old/existing software bugs.
We have some Sun V880s at work and I'm fairly sure the only part you cannot change with the power on and system running is the motherboard itself.
And I would not be surprised if some ex-Sun Gandalf Beard "well akshully"s this comment.
First, you might not reload everything in memory, so it will be patched on disk but not in process.
Second, you have not tested that the system can boot to a functional system. Say you have done live patching for 5 years and never rebooted, and then you have a power loss or hardware failure/upgrade that takes the system down. When you try to bring it back up, it doesn't work. Which configuration change in the past 5 years caused that? Which backup do you use?
And, yeah, everything is hot swappable on VAX. Those machines also cost 6+ figures, and often require a service contract that includes a permanent on site tech.
You design for this with generational tagged objects or something similar.
With that said, if high availability is not a concern then 1 can be just fine.
This is top of mind because I recently read Breakneck by Dan Wang. He makes the case that this practice of rebuilding the shrine preserves knowledge that would otherwise have been lost to time. Wang contrasts Ise Shrine with Notre Dame, where rebuilding the roof is apparently quite difficult, perhaps in part due to the loss of knowledge. I'm not familiar enough with either structure to judge whether this is a fair comparison, but I like the principle.
(Edit to add: This is only a minor analogy from the book, which I highly recommend overall.)
And the key thing is that i dont need too many details at all. A few cues and its all back in my head.
LLMs have solved this problem, they’ll happily deal with the software archaeology on your behalf. This is the kind of task they really excel at.
kqueue was a huge win too.
A huge thank you to the FreeBSD developers. I ran my first company for 15 years on FreeBSD with incredible uptime and resilience.
I just setup Semaphore the other night which adds a web UI to manage Ansible playbooks, it works like this:
1. I host my own Forgejo git repos
2. Semaphore is granted access to the Ansible repo
3. FreshRSS notifies me when a service I am running has new release
4. Check the release note, then run Semaphore to run the ansible-playbook
I could fully automate it all but I have the need to read release notes.
As for the OS, they are Debian 13 Netinst and fully local only, I could run them until the services can no longer run, which the ansible-playbook can spin up another LXC container running Debian 14 or whatever.
The goal is to automate everything as much as possible.
The applications run just fine, but I don't even know where to start. Apparently I coded them directly into the server, no dev machine!
[0]: https://cdn.idiallo.com/images/assets/daily/98/old_servers.j...
I was a bit rougher though: I just took a backup, then let my Hermes agent (Gemini 3.1 Pro) loose on it. It upgraded everything that needed to be upgraded, patched what needed to be patched, then proceeded to migrate everything to it's most recent equivalents. After that, a fair bit of server hardening was carried out followed by debloating of unused services. Likely would have continued to procrastinate doing this if it wasn't for AI support.
The other Hail Mary reference is on top of HN today.
Well done Andy Weir.
Probably, it's because of ZFS ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache). It's similar to Linux's page cache, can be claimed back any moment and different tools name it differently: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
