I see no reason not to go with a rolling release distro for personal servers. Run all the services in containers and have the base OS auto-update itself as often as it needs.
Went with openSUSE MicroOS myself, it updates and reboots almost daily so I can be pretty confident my server is healthy and it's atomic so if something does break and I don't feel like dealing with it, I can just click rollback button from cockpit and deal with it whenever I have time.
Everything you listed is the antithesis to managing and maintaining high availability systems
It's your personal toy server, you are optimizing for something entirely different than high availability.
I have around 20 "personal toy servers". I really don't like to fix them all the time.
Most of them are some small VMs or some Rasperry Pis controlling something. I want minimal changes on those systems, but still being able to update them.
Then you also have to auto-update the containers, if it's a public facing service. Either you'll have to build containers yourself or hope the developer pushes a new update whenever the base image has relevant security fixes.
Yup, podman quadlets autoupdate quite nicely. Setting up a local registry mirror with ~3d delay before applying updates is on my todo list.
My own service images already have a script that runs daily that pulls latest git updates and builds fresh images.
>!!!I see no reason not to go with a rolling release distro!!! for personal servers. Run all the services in containers and !!!have the base OS auto-update itself as often as it needs.!!!
you do not belong in IT
Personal servers.
There are things that need 9^5 and there are things that don't. If someone backs up their application configs and data properly, then the only thing that really matters is a proper backup strategy.
All my critical files are backed up periodically (manually) via rclone to S3 glacier, and all my services are documented in dokuwiki. If you use ansible or want to store configs and installation scripts, a private git repo would do well.
After that, I don't see a problem running rolling or short-support OS like Fedora Server for application hosting.
Great. I like my personal servers to just keep working. Without having to restore backups. And without having to spend one Saturday every month to update and fix all the servers.