What you’re paying extra for are timely security updates for community-maintained packages that aren’t an official part of the OS. Debian doesn’t provide that for free either. Debian doesnt provide it at all since they don’t have any paid options.
Package maintainers can be slow to update packages though. Debian have a separate security team that get patches out ASAP, and those packages go into a separate security repo. I imagine Ubuntu does the same. It’s that security team that only deals with “official” packages, meaning anything that’s not in contrib, non-free, or non-free-firmware.
I tried Mailspring but it doesn’t support folders very well, and I tried improving that myself but my dev environment never really worked properly so I gave up.
It works well if you don’t heavily use folders (e.g. via Sieve filters).
In both Debian and Ubuntu, only the main repo gets official security updates for free. Ubuntu has a paid option for universe whereas Debian doesn’t have that option and relies on the package maintainer to provide any updates.
I’d still recommend Debian over Ubuntu though, for various reasons.
Debian’s contrib repo, which is the equivalent of Ubuntu’s universe repo, doesn’t get security updates from the Debian security team, as it’s not considered an official part of Debian. Package maintianers have to provide security updates. www.debian.org/security/faq#contrib
The difference is that Ubuntu provide paid support for contrib packages, including patches. Debian doesn’t have any official paid support options.
Most of the time, that should be Alpine, because they provide the slimmest base image.
Distroless containers (e.g. github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless, Chiselled Ubuntu, etc) are often smaller than Alpine ones. Google’s smallest Debian-based one is around 2MB.
I have a Dockerized C# app… I’m going to try .NET Native AOT (which was improved a lot in .NET 8, released today) to compile it into a self-contained binary, and see how well it works with a distroless base container.
What does being federated mean in this case? Git is already distributed. Is it just for discovery, or do you mean for things like issues and discussions?
I use Mailcow and it works well. Easy to configure, and it uses Docker so it’s self-contained and very easy to move to a new server if you ever need to do that.
I’m using an SMTP relay for outbound emails, though. I didn’t want to have to deal with IP reputation issues, especially with Microsoft/Hotmail. I’m hosting my server on a VPS, and spammers in the same subnet can result in the entire subnet getting blocklisted. Configuring a relay is easy in Mailcow’s UI, and can be configured per domain.
Docker images should really be distroless most of the time. There’s way too much junk in the majority of Docker images when in most cases, you really just need your app and whatever dynamic libraries or runtimes it requires (if you can’t statically compile it). You don’t need an OS in there!
Also there’d be way more servers running Debian compared to Ubuntu.
Or, asked another way, does systemd load the Linux kernel, and if not, what does?
Immediately after the BIOS/POST, the first thing that starts is the boot loader. This is usually a piece of software called GRUB. There’s a part of GRUB in the Master Boot Record on the drive, that the loads the rest of GRUB from /boot. /boot has to be a basic partition so that the MBR code can mount it, so for example if you use something a bit fancier (like LVM) then you’ll usually have a separate small ext2 or FAT partition just for /boot.
GRUB shows a list of available kernels, and other operating systems (if any are installed), based on a config in /boot.
Once you select a kernel to boot (or wait a few seconds for it to automatically choose the default option), it starts loading the kernel. There is a small disk image called the “initial ramdisk” in /boot, usually with a name like initrd or initramfs. This is a small ramdisk that contains all the drivers needed to mount your root partition - for example, drive drivers (NVMe, SATA, etc), file system drivers (ext4, ZFS, XFS, etc), LVM, RAID drivers if needed, and so on. If the root disk is on an NFS network share (not as common any more, but still doable), it also needs to contain network drivers for your network card. It also contains a few basic utilities, usually provided by BusyBox.
Some Linux distros (such as Debian) build a custom initramfs, whereas others (like Fedora) have a generic one containing all possible drivers.
The initial ramdisk then mounts the root partition and hands control over to the Linux kernel, which starts actually booting the OS. The very first process the kernel starts running is the init process, which these days is usually systemd but can be a different one like sysvinit or runit.
Debian lets you switch and AFAIK it mostly works fine. They provide both sysvinit and runit as alternatives. Packages are only required to provide systemd units now, however a lot of core packages still provide sysvinit scripts, and Debian provides a package orphan-sysvinit-scripts that contains all the legacy sysvinit scripts that package maintianers have chosen to remove from their packages.
That’s just in the official repository, of course. Third-party repos can do whatever they want.