Linux for everyone, across every distro
You know Linux. Just not this Linux. You SSH in, go to set a static IP the way you’ve done it a thousand times, and the box has never heard of the file you’re reaching for. That muscle memory you built on Ubuntu? Dead on arrival on Rocky. The package manager is apt here and dnf there, and pacman on that one machine nobody bothered to document. The firewall could be ufw or firewalld or, if you’re unlucky, raw nftables somebody left half-configured. So I built the reference I kept wishing existed, and then the deep-dives and migration guides piled up around it. Honestly I think the “for dummies” framing is what made me avoid most Linux writing, so there’s none of that here.
Linux Distro Reference
The one I open daily. Pick a distro (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Rocky, Arch, openSUSE, Alpine), pick a topic (network, firewall, services, logs, packages, users, system, storage), and out comes the command, the files it touches, the workflow, the verify step, plus the one gotcha that’ll bite you if you skip it. Stuck between two distros? Diff them side by side.
Topics covered
Eight topics. These are where the syntax actually splits between distros, so they’re where you waste the most time second-guessing yourself. Get comfortable with them and most of the day-to-day friction just goes away.
Distros currently covered
Seven, for now. These are the ones I keep tripping over on real production boxes in 2026, not a tour of everything that exists. Touch servers for a living and you’ll run into most of them sooner or later.
What you get by default on AWS, GCP, Azure, OVHcloud and Hetzner. Supported five years, out to 2029.
The upstream Ubuntu is built on. Lighter and a lot more conservative about change. It’s what I run into most on bare metal and self-hosted boxes.
Ships every six months. Where dnf5 and the newest systemd features land first, usually a good year ahead of the enterprise rebuilds.
Binary-compatible rebuilds, supported all the way to 2032. If it’s enterprise, odds are it’s one of these.
Minimal to start, then you pick every piece yourself. Beloved by power users and anyone who lives in the AUR.
Runs YaST and wicked, and it’s everywhere in European enterprise. Tumbleweed is its rolling sibling.
My default container base image, though maybe that’s just habit at this point. Tiny and fast, with no glibc and no systemd to fight.
Articles in the series
The tool hands you the command. These tell you why it’s that command. Each one takes a single cross-distro topic and chews on it properly: the trade-offs, the migration patterns, and the bit of history that finally makes today’s weird defaults make sense.
Live Network configuration across Linux distros in 2026: netplan, NetworkManager, systemd-networkd compared I line up the four big network stacks across all seven distros, side by side. There’s a decision tree and the migration patterns, plus the gotchas that’ll absolutely catch you out if nobody warned you. ~2000 words. Live Securing a Linux Ubuntu 24.04 Server: SysAdmin Hardening Checklist The deep cut for Ubuntu: a 10-step hardening run I actually follow. SSH key-only, UFW, fail2ban, AppArmor in enforce mode, auditd. ~2300 words. Live Server Monitoring with Nagios on Hyper-V: Step-by-Step Setup Guide A full Nagios Core 4.5 build inside a Hyper-V Ubuntu VM, start to finish. Probes, plus mail and Telegram alerts. ~2300 words. Live Firewall comparison: ufw vs firewalld vs nftables vs iptables in 2026 One network-filter scenario, written four different ways. When I’d pick each, how to migrate between them, and what the kernel actually sees once you strip the abstraction away. Live Migrating production from CentOS 7 / 8 to Rocky 9 (or Alma 9): practical playbook The migration a lot of shops are still quietly putting off in 2026. ELevate, the in-place upgrade caveats nobody warns you about, and then the boring pre-flight checks. Those last ones are what catch the breaks before they bite you at 2am. Live Choosing a Linux distro for your team in 2026: a decision framework How I’d actually choose, weighing the skills your team already has against your compliance constraints, your support model and your container strategy. Fewer “Ubuntu vs Debian” hot takes. More of the inputs that actually move the decision.Linux security and server deep-dives
The hands-on ones. These live on actual Linux servers, not in theory. Copy-paste commands the whole way down, and the diagrams are ones I drew myself rather than lifted from a vendor deck.
Live Linux Kernel Hardening: Essential sysctl Checklist for 2026 32 sysctl toggles, grouped by subsystem, plus a ready-to-drop /etc/sysctl.d/99-hardening.conf and a one-liner to catch drift later. Live Self-Hosted VPN with WireGuard: Complete Setup Guide Server and client configs, split versus full tunnel, the 1-RTT handshake finally explained in plain terms. Plus the firewall and DNS pieces, and the hardening bits almost everybody skips. Live Build a SOC Homelab: Wazuh + Suricata + Elastic Stack Stand up host and network detection entirely on free open-source software, mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, with dashboards you’ll actually want to look at. Live Setting Up Wazuh SIEM on a Budget Three hardware paths (Raspberry Pi 5, N100 mini-PC, ARM cloud) to run a single-node SIEM cheaply. Live DNS over HTTPS Implementation Guide for Sysadmins What DoH actually protects (and what it doesn’t), how to set it up on Linux, Windows and macOS endpoints, and how to self-host the whole thing with unbound + dnsdist.Linux command-line tools
Interactive builders for the commands you type a hundred times a week. Tick the options, copy something that just runs. Every flag comes explained, so you’re not squinting at a man page to figure out what you just built. Runs in your browser. Free.
Companion tools on the site
A few more we ship that aren’t strictly Linux but end up in the same toolbox anyway.
How this series evolves
The reference picks up new distros when people ask, and new topics whenever they come up. Articles land at roughly two a month. None of them are invented out of thin air, or at least I try hard not to: each one comes from something I actually hit, or a question that showed up in the inbox often enough that it earned the long version. Want a topic covered, or a distro added? Tell me on the contact page. A good chunk of what’s already here started as exactly that kind of message.
