Hello there lemmings! Finally I have taken up the courage to buy a low power mini PC to be my first homeserver (Ryzen 5500U, 16GB RAM, 512 SSD, already have 6TB external HDD tho). I have basically no tangible experience with Debian or Fedora-based system, since my daily drivers are Arch-based (although I’m planning to switch my laptop over to Fedora).
What’s your experiences with Debian and Rocky as a homeserver OS?
As others have said, debian is very minimal, so If you would prefer to setup and configure the whole system yourself, debian is a good choice.
Personally, I prefer fedora server. It comes with more things configured out of the box (zram and sysctl configs for example) as well as better security defaults (selinux included with proper policies) and first class support for container infrastructure. Ultimately you could achieve a similar end result with debian, but for my homeservers I prefer to let the fedora team handle most of the system configuration for me.
I would be careful if they wanna use zfs though. Fedora can be a bit quick on the kernels meaning a kernel can come out that isn’t supported by zfs. This causes zfs to fail to build the kernel module on the new kernel and so you lose zfs on the next boot.
Almost happened to me tracking debian testing a while back.