Fedora as a Server? Would You Do It?

Plenty of sysadmins will tell you Fedora is a great desktop and the wrong choice for a server. Is that still true, or is it a reputation Fedora hasn't outgrown? This week it's just the two of us, and we put the question to ourselves.

We get into:

• Where the hesitation actually comes from, and whether it describes the Fedora of today or the Fedora of a few years ago
• What Fedora Server is, who it's for, and how it sits next to the image-based options
• Whether bootc changes the math, when the OS is an image you build and roll back rather than a thing you upgrade in place
• Fedora as an appliance, which Noah is seeing more of in industry, including one running inside a medical organization
• Nine months of support, and what a live upgrade path would have to look like
• Noah's argument that the thing standing between Fedora and a production server is not technical at all, it's a path of escalation, and that IT malpractice is a real category

We also go thoroughly off topic for a few minutes while Noah explains why ad targeting feels like your phone is listening to you, and why it isn't. Eric calls it out on air. We left it in.

No guest this week. Just the two of us arguing in good faith and mostly landing on "it depends."

So we want your answer. Would you run Fedora on a server, and why or why not? Bonus points if you have actually done it in production. Comments, the Matrix room, or, as Noah correctly points out, RFC 1149.

• Fedora Server
• Fedora Server documentation
• Fedora bootc documentation
• FP054 BootC in the Wild
• FP062 What is Hummingbird
• RFC 1149, IP over Avian Carriers