Should You Run Arch Linux on Your Servers?

I've decided to run Arch Linux for all my side projects (old and new). Here's my experiences and advice.

TL;DR: There are some real advantages: package management, minimalism, and pay-as-you-go tech debt plans, among other things. If you're trying to use Arch Linux in your company's infrastructure, make sure you have a good image-building (and testing) process before proceeding.

[tutoriaLinux]

“I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.” - Alan Perlis

[ryanzerbe]

Ive been running Arch on my server for about 2 years, I love it.

[zerotheory]

I'm a student learning networking, could you demonstrate in a video sometime how you'd go about making the test environment and putting it through the tests so you know its stable enough to go live? I'm not quite understanding how that process works.

[Janhouse]

I would never run Archlinux on servers. From time to time there are breaking changes that will mess it up. And then unless you have some way of accessing the system without successful boot, you will be in trouble.
But I do run Archlinux on servers inside LXC/LXD containers.
This way I get a very stable base distro (Debian/Ubuntu) that I can and do enable automatic updates for (including automatic reboots after kernel updates), and I get the flexibility from Archlinux and other distros.
Another reason I run everything in LXC/LXD/Docker containers is the ability to separate and migrate them quickly to any hosting out there.
I have been using this approach for almost 10 years and I no longer get problems with different version incompatibilities causing issues after upgrades. If thing can run on newer version - great. If something is not compatible with newer libs or something else for some reason - not a problem.

[ryad]

I've been using Arch for over 12 years now on various environments including production servers. I think your most important argument is starting at 4:16 were I totally agree. Admins and companies always target a "safe" environment with "well tested and stable" packages. In theory totally understandable. But as you pointed out: In practice once you upgrade your LTS server, the whole thing may fall apart and you have to fix and re-configure - or even adapt your codebase in your application - for days to come. Of course it always depends on the production applications, but I truly believe that in very most cases the trade-off between so called "stable" packages against the benefits of rolling releases isn't worth it.

[BHOP]

I have been using Arch for almost 20 years. The past few years has seen Arch grow quite significantly. It's a brilliant OS.

[TopLinuxTech]

I'm very curious to try Arch on servers as well. It will require a little bit more effort in maintenance, care and backups, but pretty much doable.

[crab_aesthetics]

I've been considering this for my home server for a little while now after getting used to arch-based distros on the desktop. The ability to not have to deal with major upgrades every couple of years and have to hope that everything upgrades without problems is huge. Might have to make a project out of installing Arch as server on a VM and figuring out how to configure it as a domain controller.

[TheCodyBond]

I really enjoy using Arch, especially on desktops/laptops. I run it on some of my servers but have trouble maintaining my configuration files. Keeping up with any non-OOB configuration files can be a pain whenever the upstream developers change the file format or add new features. I've had some success using a combination of pacman hooks/pacdiff but it's still a manual merge process.

[tlcode]

Now tha CentOS is dead..this will become a BIG question.

[tomontheinternet]

As a non ops person, I expected to hear a lecture on why a rolling release is a security hazard. Happily surprised.
When you talk about servers, do you mean VMs or docker containers, or both?

[DevOpsJourney]

We were so preoccupied with whether or not we could, we didn’t stop to think if we should!

[DavidThorarinsson]

This is interesting and counter to everything I do with development. As in if your applications are developing rapidly then rapidly changing underpinnings create more changing variables that can make pinning down issues in very complex architectures difficult. Any thought on that? The only “solution” to that is having more extremely competent staff available which is costly. Another thought: is there a wiki out there somewhere that outlines Arch on server best practices?

[darkmtbg]

I'm part of a software development company and we recently had to focus on our tech stack. upgrading the different dependencies, base docker images, code base versions. and it have been taking way too long to really update and fine adjust our setup to be more modern. it kinda got to a point that an external requirement had to force management to set off time to actually do it. while being told multiple times that if we didn't soon do anything we could be stuck upgrading the setup for multiple weeks for multiple people involved in the process.
Having a rolling release techstack would have been way better. im considering replacing my truenas with Arch base image.

[ericr]

I'm jealous that you work at a place that has the IT resources for continuous update testing. I wish. 🙂

[frankperdue]

I might be the only one...
But at first glance when I saw the thumbnail "holy crap is that Maddox!?!?" 😷🤘🏻

[RyanFromUltrasound]

On of the things that irked me when I using arch was was the conflicts that I had to address when staying bleeding edge. I never thought about the implications that had for tech debt. Blessing in disguise. :D

[vladimirsiman]

I am running Arch on few servers too, for maybe more than 2 years. The only bad thing on rolling update is that you do not really know WHEN the breaking change will happen. Some level of prediction would be nice to have if you need to plan your work, maybe. It does not mean I do not like it. But this may be definitely a con..

[wisteela]

I was wondering how it would compare to Ubuntu Server.

[zeyadkenawi]

After 2 years. Do you have anything to add? Any nuances happened. any outages happened (I hope not) because of using Arch? Or any feedback in general. I'm really interested