On Debian and Ubuntu, two commands look like they do the same thing. They do not. adduser is a Perl wrapper from the adduser package. useradd is the raw binary from upstream shadow-utils. The difference catches operators who write portable scripts and expect either name to work the same way on RHEL or Alpine.
The default Debian installer is competent. It is also opinionated. It makes a dozen choices on your behalf that you would probably make differently if you knew you were making them. The Expert Install is not for elite users. It is for anyone who wants to know what their system actually contains the moment after first boot.
When CVE-2026-31431 dropped on April 29 with a public proof-of-concept and no vendor patches available, every Linux machine in the homelab was affected. Two weeks later the OpenSSH GSSAPIKeyExchange flaw shipped as DSA-6204-1 and the question arose again. This post is the short writeup of how Ansible turned both incidents into routine work.
Snap is bloated, slow, and centralized junk
Why I Keep Coming Back to Debian
Debian 10 released a month ago, ending Stretch's two-year run. The headline change is nftables replacing iptables as the default firewall framework. The deeper changes — secure boot, default AppArmor, Wayland coming into focus — are what will matter over the next two years.
ext4 will hand you a corrupted file and swear everything is fine. ZFS checksums every block, repairs what it can, and makes snapshots cost nothing. With ZoL 0.7 out and Stretch a contrib package away from it, here is why my homelab storage now runs on copy-on-write, and the licensing mess you sign up for by using it.
Debian 9 Stretch released two weeks ago, ending Jessie's reign as stable. Most servers will upgrade through the year. Here is what is genuinely new, what is worth knowing before you migrate, and what is going to bite you.
Stretch is out, dedicated to Ian Murdock, with over 90% of packages now reproducible, MariaDB instead of MySQL, and the modern GnuPG by default. It also renames your network interfaces out from under you, which is how a routine upgrade locks you out of your own server. Here is what is worth caring about, and what to check before you reboot.
A brief summary of what this post is about.