I had been a happy customer of Ubuntu 8.04 server edition for quite some time. It was stable, ran without problems, and got me as far as 130 days (power failure :() without requiring a restart, and that too on my old box which can hardly handle anything else.
But 8.04 was fading out (not being a LTS version), so I thought may be I should dist-upgrade to 9.04. Well I did and, to say the least, things have been pretty rough.
The server has not been as stable as I’d would like, my iptables rules don’t load well anymore, I just keep loosing internet connectivity at least once every hour, my ssh connections to the box just keep getting terminated and I need a restart almost once a week to bring my file transfers upto speed.
So I think its now time to abandon Ubuntu and move to my Linux of choice.
Arch Linux offers what I need from my server system.
- Rolling release cycles – So I probably wont need a system-wide upgrade, just an update once every now and then to get my packages updated.
- Minimal Linux – So I know exactly what is going on on my system. Easy to configure, easier to find problems.
- Recent software releases - Arch Linux community is pretty good at keeping up with new releases, you almost always have the latest release of a software available through pacman or, if not, through ABS. Not always good for server systems, but always good when bug-fixes are being pushed out.
- I use it as my primary operating system on my desktop and I love it.