I recently became interessted in learning about static site generators. So I decided to start a little 11ty blog, in which I teach people, who are new to self-hosting, how to securely set up their own server with Ubuntu and Docker.
For now, I’ve got my Beginners Guide series as well as a more detailed introduction to SSH and its features. I plan to eventually write down all I’ve learned about self-hosting in the past 20 years.
Hope it ends up being helpful for some of you.
Why is that, if I may ask? I’ve used both for years and personally I find Ubuntu has fewer footguns for a new user, and an easisr upgrade process.
I prefer Debian’s community-driven governance model, the higher degree of freedom over the system and lack of preinstalled software that I neither need nor want, and the quiet stability that Debian offers.
I also have just not liked Ubuntu’s decisions over the years. Little things that piled up like the Unity stuff a few years back (or I guess almost a decade at this point), the forced inclusion of snapd, that time they said they wouldn’t offer 32-bit libraries, the little message advertising Ubuntu Pro in the shell.
I’ve always felt like Debian is happy to just get out of the way and let you use it how you want to use it. That control is what I look for in a distro. What you call “footguns” are to me just more options for control.
For me the footguns in debian have been an unintuitive upgrade process that lets you break things, and configurations/software that don’t work well out of the box without user knowledge and intervention. But for my server, Debian has been very nice and lightweight.
Even though Ubuntu is not always pure good the way that Debian is (remember when they had Amazon advertisements and search integrated into the desktop), and minor annoyances like the apt advert are annoying, but they offer an amount of stability and ease of use that I think earns the nickname “preconfigured Debian”
Debian’s footguns are better documented and are generally there for good reason. Ubuntu’s footguns are there because “fuck the user”.
Yeah, I don’t know anything about self-hosting, but I’ve recently been working on switching from Windows 10 to Linux and I’ve been really enjoying Kubuntu so far.