So I’ve been running a little 2 node rpi kubernetes cluster for over a year now, bootstrapped with Ansible and Helm (source). I picked Ubuntu Server at the time because I think the official 64-bit Raspbian OS was still young or maybe not even out at the time (can’t quite remember) but I’ve found myself fighting with Ubuntu an awful lot culminating in a major version upgrade to “jammy” last night that has wrecked one of my nodes. It even tried to delete the running kernel during the upgrade but caught itself and asked me to confirm, wtf. I’ve never experienced a Linux upgrade this bad. Yeah, “jammy” is right. Luckily I use a separate NAS for persistence. So I’m breaking up with Ubuntu, which I think is the cool thing to do these days anyway, and using this as an opportunity to rebuild and clean up my IaC.
I am most familiar with Red Hat distros (Fedora/CentOS daily drivers for years now, RHEL servers at work) though I’m not familiar with the ARM ecosystem there. Ive also been wanting to try NixOS for a while but looking at some of the rpi config last night had me a little concerned because it felt unfamiliar. Then of course there’s the Official Raspbian OS, 64 bit support should be solid by now.
What OS are you using for your Raspberry Pi servers? Any I should definitely avoid?
I’ve used alpine for minimal container images, but never as a workstation or server (or arch for that matter). Config management isn’t an issue, I already ansibilized my config and a significant amount is removing crap I don’t want for Ubuntu so maybe going minimal and installing exactly what I need is would be cleaner. Hmmm. Tempting.