Edit2: OK Per feedback I am going to have a dedicated external NAS and a separate homeserver. The NAS will probably run TrueNAS. The homeserver will use an immutable os like fedora silverblue. I am doing a dedicated NAS because it can be good at doing one thing - serving files and making backups. Then my homeserver can be good at doing whatever I want it to do without accidentally torching my data.
I haven't found any good information on which distro to use for the NAS I am building. Sure, there are a few out there. But as far as I can tell, none are immutable and that seems to be the new thing for long term durability.
Edit: One requirement is it will run a media server with hardware transcoding. I'm not quite sure if I can containerize jellyfin and still easily hardware transcode without a more expensive processor that supports hyper-v.
I use NixOS for this. It works wonderfully.
Immutable means different things to different people, but to me:
- Different programs don't conflict with each other.
- My entire server config is stored in a versioned Git repo.
- I can rollback OS updates trivially and pick which base OS version I want to use.
As of my understanding, immutable systems are useful for Devices that are more bound to change, like a Desktop you actually use to install programs try out things and so on.
I do not see much benefit here for a stable server system. If you are worried about stability and uptime, a testing system does a better job here, IMHO.
Immutable systems are useful for separating the system and application layers and to enable clean and easy rollbacks. On servers the applications are often already separated anyway through the use of container technologies. So having atomic system updates could enable faster and less risky security patching without changing anything about how applications are handled.
Flatcar linux (this is what I use for my NAS/homeserver) and CoreOS are both good.
edit: OpenSUSE has microOS: https://microos.opensuse.org/
Typically on a home server you would virtualize services anyway so it really doesn't matter what distro is running on the metal.
And also if you're fully virtualized you can switch out the host distro anytime you want, so you can adopt an immutable one later if you want.
Why do you want an immutable distro anyway?
I want immutability because I come from a the debian world where everything just works. But I want the benefits of using modern versions of packages.
If you're running unstable system packages, immutability won't really save your stability.
So don't complicate it, and just use Debian with nix and home-manager. That way you have a stable base, and you can create a list of bleeding edge packages that should be installed. In any case it should be essentially only docker + whatever can't be dockerised.
