Debian has less complexityand is very stable. It has a nice wiki and a Debian system can run for a few years on unattended upgrades.
Edit: this post was originally about cost savings but that is not really a useful metric
from which OS? Ubuntu? Rocky/RHEL? Windows Server?
Mostly Ubuntu. Comes with a ton of extras installed which add storage and ram usage along with additional complexity.
Ubuntu server has a minimal server installation option.
Compared to Arch Linux then yeah you’ll save a ton of money almost guaranteed. But something like Windows? Good luck trying to calculate that.
I don’t really subscribe to Arch or Debian being better or worse than each other. I encounter issues just as frequently on both. Maybe it’s a little harder to do things in Debian because the repositories don’t update as often but the AUR is where a lot of important stuff is and that’s a pain to deal with too.
Either way it’s better than using Windows.
I wouldn’t even deploy Arch in production as its not designed to be stable.
I mean you’d have to be pretty insane to use Arch on an actual server.
That or a masochist.
Define what you mean by “overhead”
Mostly RAM usage
Debian uses like 200MBs of ram for a basic fresh install. That’s negligible.
Unless you’re deploying 500 virtual machines on a single server, that all run a single simple basic task the base ram usage of the OS shouldn’t even be a factor.
OK, and compared to what? “Less” is a comparison, but you didn’t specify what you’re comparing Debian to.
Out-of-the-box RAM usage is a pretty specious metric because you’re not installing Debian (or any other OS) just to have sit there in its out-of-the-box condition. Do you think a Debian server running Apache with 1000 vhosts will use less RAM than a RHEL server running nginx with 10 vhosts?Removed by mod
Computing resource usage of your OS should be indistinguishable from $0 almost everywhere.
