I am currently running Ubuntu 24.04 and upgrading the server is alright, but can give headaches (SASL did not work for example, so I needed to run virtualmin config-system --include SASL to get Mail sending to work again over SMTP), so I would like to switch to a Linux that self upgrades.
First off would this solve these issues in the future or is it delusional to think that self-upgrading will not break things similar to jumping from Ubuntu 20 to 24 like I did a week ago?
And secondly which Linux distro would you recommend for this?
I read there is for example Fedora CoreOS, openSUSE MicroOS or Arch Linux.
For servers, it’s better to use long-term support Linux versions and deal with full server upgrades every ten years or so. It’s always better to set up a brand new server and migrate your data over.
We support Fedora Server and Kali Linux as Grade B OS, but I can’t recommend using them for a production server environment. Though you could, but it doesn’t mean things won’t break. And, in fact, the chances of things breaking are usually higher than for Grade A OS.
Thank you Ilja, this is the answer I was looking for.
It would be nice though, if there would be some Linux Distro that tries to offer some sort of auto upgrade between versions without breaking stuff or offering assisted upgrading if the LTS version runs out. Right now upgrading always comes with some bugs that need to ironed out in my usecase.
So for example an OS that autoupgrades to the next LTS version two years after it was released, so you stay behind the curve, but recent enough, and all the major bugs have been squished already.
How do you expect this to work? Someone would need to create shims. It just wouldn’t work out of the box. Someone has to do it. This is why major versions exist.
And, we don’t control the upstream distros, and upstream distros don’t control the hundreds of vendors who might break things. For example, Dovecot 2.4 removed and changed several config options, causing breaking changes.
Just don’t distro upgrade. There’s no good reason these days to distro upgrade unless you use a bare metal machine. Just set up a new OS, copy the files, check everything, then change the DNS. It’s easy, and you avoid lots of pitfalls along the way.
Just don’t wait so long. The upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04 would have been pretty painless, and then the upgrade from 22.04 to 24.04 would have been mostly painless (but it is true that there is a packaging bug in 24.04 that leads to the issue you saw…nothing to be done about that…Ubuntu is sloppy sometimes).