My last CentOS machines are retired

Over the past few years I have used a number of different Linux distributions in addition to FreeBSD and MacOS. My daily work is also often done on Microsoft Windows machines. I am not a fan of the best operating system battle. In my opinion, the best system is the one that gets the job done and runs for years, with bugs fixed and security maintained.

The Linux world tends to argue about the right way to do things more than the BSD world. But because it is more widely used, I have tended to use Linux for many things for years.

First I started using SuSE, then I used Gentoo as my main distro for a long time, and then I chose CentOS as my main distro. I used CentOS 5.x for many deployments and it was a nice distro. Even when RedHat cut CentOS 8 from the latest patches, I migrated many machines to Rocky Linux for the time beeing. However, since I don't want to be forced to change distros again, I now choose Debian as my main distro for Linux-driven stuff. I have always used Debian from time to time for deployments and on a laptop, but now it is the main Linux distro and it works very well for me and my setups.

The migration of the home systems is now complete. The last system was my web server and this was done a few days ago and worked very well. The setup on my private web server is not too complicated as it only hosts this static blog with no dynamic language support. Fire up the web server of your choice and have fun pointing it to the right directory, responding to the right domains and setting up let's encrypt for the TLS setup. I'm not going to write a blog post about this in 2023, just use a search engine and have fun.

One good thing about the consolidation forced by systemd integration in many Linux distributions is the more straightforward way of doing things. I hope Debian keeps up the good work of responding quickly to security problems and delivering a good operating system. Even at work we have recently migrated a number of machines to Debian. We cannot replace it in all places. But anything that does not require a RHEL or SLES system, we choose Debian these days.

If you like your distribution or any other open source software, consider sending them some bucks to keep their infrastructure and the project going.