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Lightweight distro for home server?
(pawb.social)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Gentoo, at least, is an unspecialized metadistribution that can be used for whatever purpose you can come up with. It can certainly be put on a server, but for someone lacking Gentoo experience the learning curve might be a little steep, and depending on exactly what software you want, compiling it may take a while on an older machine.
So speaking as a Gentoo user, Debian is a not-unreasonable choice for this use case. It's certainly stable enough.