Currently working on an Arch server for my self hosting needs. I love arch, in my eyes its the perfect platform for self hosting. There is no bloat, making it lightweight and resource efficient. Its also very stable if you go down the lts route and have the time and skills to head off problems before they become catastrophic.
The downsides. For someone who is a semi-noob there is a very steep learning curve. Arch is very well documented but when you hit a problem or a brick wall its very frustrating. My low tolerence for bullshit means I take hours/days long breaks from it. There’s also time demands in the real world so needless to say I’ve been going at it for a few weeks now.
Unraid is very appealing - nice clean interface, out-of-the-box solutions for whatever you want to do, easy NAS management… What’s not to like? If it was fully open-source I would’ve bought into it from the start. At least once a day I think “I’m done. Sign me up unraid”. Its taking an age to set up the Arch server. If I went for unraid I could be self hosting in a matter of hours. Unraid is the antitheses of Arch. Arch is for masochists.
Do you ever look at products like unraid and think “fuck this shit, gimme some of that”? What is your version of this? Have you ever actually done it and regretted it/lived happily ever after?
Reading that is wild
Why are you doing Arch on a server? You want to tinker forever and read the update notes like a hawk lest the server implode forever?
Arch isn’t gonna be noticeably leaner than Debian.
Get Debian, install docker and/or podman, set unattended upgrades, and then install Incus if you need VMs or containers down the line. You can stick on ZFS and it’ll be fine, you already have BTRFS for basic mirrors. Install Cockpit and you’ll have a nice GUI. Try not to think you have to fiddle with settings, the maintainers for each package/service have set it so it works for most people (and we’re most people!); you’ll only need to intervene on an handful of package configs. All set and it’s not proprietary.
That’s the way you to go
There was a thread yesterday where most people were choosing arch for their server, I didn’t get it either. Like you, I’d much rather Debian or something else with smoother updates.
It’s probably because tech influencers on insert your fav video scrolling app love choosing arch as their flavor of the month Linux distro
Agreed, I run arch on my desktop and laptop, because it is more stable (in the sense of fewer bugs, things like suspend/resume works reliably for example) than any other distro I have used.
But on my VPS and my Pi I run Debian because it is more stable (in the sense of fewer upgrades that could break things). I can enable unattended upgrades there, which I would never do on my Arch system (though it is incredibly rare for those to break).
Also: if someone said they were a (self proclaimed) “semi noob” I would not recommend Arch. I have used Linux since 2002, and as my main OS since 2006. (Furthermore I’m a software developer in C/C++/Rust.) While Arch is a great distro, don’t start with Arch.