Best fit is always dependent on how you're planning to use it. Find out what your requirements before you set up a server.

Generally Debian is chosen very often, but I'd wager pretty much any distro will do. Your own experience goes a long way in making a distro a good choice.

Debian is a great pick. It's stable and has a great support community.

Debian would be the most obvious choice. Perhaps Alma is also a good option. If you would like a european option, OpenSUSE leap can also do the job.

Can't say anything for professional use, but debian is rock solid, always a strong choice for servers.

Denian Stable. It just works.

I personally favour Alpine Linux for its minimalism, but Devuan or Debian are fine, and more familiar choices, too. Depending on what you intend to run, especially appliance-like things, OpenBSD might be a good alternative.

Debian & Alma of course!

Professional as in an organisation? You should probably start by gathering functional and non-functional requirements from stakeholders.

DEBIAN

Debian or Fedora

I personally go with Fedora Server with automatic security updates.

I usually have Debian on all my servers for stability, and run almost everything inside containers for convenience. The few things that run directly in Debian are nginx for reverse proxying to container services, fail2ban+firewall, and wireguard for everything that moves data between servers/computers/devices I own

Rhel if you are using professionally. Their enterprise support staff are wizards when it comes to finding the cause of random issues.

Alpine.

debian, but i prefer devuan personally

What's failed about their newest release ?

I'd go with Debian but it's just a personal preference. I had some difficult to set up a samba server the other day in one of my laptops that was running fedora because of firewall configs that I don't use in Debian like adding context or something. Besides that, I kinda think dnf is better than apt in some ways but still use Debian on my home server. I just works

Depends on what you mean by professional and your needs.

Debian (stable) is rock solid but (because) slow changing, if your application is slow (or not) changing it's probably the better choice, but if you need new things before it's ready for a new version it'll be pain. It's the professional sysad's choice because they'll likely not have to do anything.

Fedora is faster moving (think cutting edge, not bleeding edge (e.g. Arch) as opposed to Debian's blunt safety) so if you're in active development it's likely a better choice. It is also sort of the testing arm for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is the quintessential professional Distro, so you'll learn some of that along the way.

If you are choosing between Fedora and Debian, definitely go with Debian. Fedora evolves too rapidly for professional use, and its administration requires excessive effort.

I've used rocky Linux on a couple of boxes and it's been very good to me though I've since rationalised everything to Debian for the sake of simplifying my setup.

My first choice would still be Ubuntu, however if you don't like them RHEL is available for free for homelab's by jumping through some hoops.

Might also take a look at NixOS. Been running it for a while with no issues.

Do yourself a favor and go with Nixos. Dive head first into to the rabbit hole and set up a repeatable and immutable system. You'll thank yourself later when so many maintenance tasks become a GitOps workflow: update config, commit, push, build, deploy, rollback if it fails

how common is ubuntu on servers?

SME here, moving around 300 vms from Rocky to Debian.

But your question is really too vague. Our workflows are quite traditional, but the world is a big place and there is no single right answer here.

I think there are many right answers, and in the end it's dependent on your personal likings. I am self-hosting using Fedora, and I couldn't be happier.

Both Debian and RHEL-like distros are solid choices. Both are super stable. Debian tends to not always have the newest packages, so if you want that I'd steer away from Debian. Personally I use Rocky Linux for my servers. It's based on RHEL, meaning each new major version benefits from Red Hat's 10 years of software support. Debian (and derivates) have better community support I think, but RHEL has very solid documentation (which for the most part applies directly to Rocky, Alma etc.)

Here's a great article outlining the differences between Alma and Rocky.

But for something simple like running a Go application, both should work just fine, so choose what you're most comfortable with.

Rocky is available at Scaleway too.

Github has zero 9's so at this point just use Arch for everything fuck it

(I would personally recommend Debian)

Professional? And you're just switching vendors because you "want to"?

Rocky and Alma Linux are both Red Hat Enterprise Linux

I would use Ubuntu LTS (free) or Redhat Enterprise Linux. If paying is not an option, some RHEL derivate would probably also work.

Care to elaborate how Ubuntu failed newest release?

How did Ubuntu fail their newest release?

Hannah Montana Linux

Professional Server grade distro, would probably be either Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or OpenSUSE Enterprise Linux.

For my personal homelab server I run Arch Linux, but I wouldn't do it in an enterprise.

arch linux btw

Slackware, be bold.

I’ve seen mostly RHEL in professional server environments.