Choosing a Distro
I am currently setting up a server for a Digital Humanities project that’s being built by a group of professors in various aspects of the Humanities> I and another colleague technical assistance from are the only folks with technical backgrounds. There are a half dozen others wit little to no tech skills.
Given that we want these folks to eventually be confident enough to maintain web pages on the server, is there a particular distribution available on Linode that would be best for our project?
I currently have a Linode that runs Ubuntu 14. I suppose if I choose Ubuntu for this project I will probably go with 16.
What kinds of consideration might make me choose a different distro? Debian 8 for example or another one?
1 Reply
The distro of choice makes no difference in regard to having non-technical users be able to update their own webpages or websites.
Note that Ubuntu 14 LTS reached EOL this past April. 18 LTS is the current version I would be running since I would’ve upgraded before that time.
If you choose Debian then I would use version 9 since 8 has been out for a few years now and will reach EOL sooner.
Ubuntu is a fork of Debian. Debian tends to focus on stability and only issues out security updates, rather than version upgrades for its packages. Packages are only upgraded when a new OS version is released, unless you’re pulling from the testing branch.
When it comes down to it, any OS will or should regularly released security updates and you should keep your OS updated.
Any other questions you have, feel free to ask.