Though many Raspberry Pi owners run the Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian), in this guide I chose to use Ubuntu. Ubuntu LTS is a long-term support Debian-based Linux OS. Ubuntu is renowned for its desktop support, but it also provides a comfortable home server experience.
A server should be stable. We want to apply software updates, but we also want to avoid the need to update the major version of the base OS every year. The Official Gnome LTS releases with the Gnome desktop environment in the main software repository are supported for up to 5 years from the time of the initial release, and for up to 10 years with extended security-only updates via Ubuntu Advantage access1, also known as Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM).
Without ESM not all repositories get the same level of support. For example, the community-supported desktop environments located in the universe software repository only get best-effort maintenance from Canonical and the Ubuntu community. Nonetheless, most critical services are installed from the base repository, and thus have excellent functional and security support.
However with an ESM/Advantage/Pro account, then all packages get security updates for 10 years from initial release. This change was introduced in January of 2023.
As with all OS distributions the versions of major software stay with the initial release, and patches to the software are for bugs and security issues for those software versions.
Generally you should think about upgrading your server OS every few years so that you stay in touch with current technologies, and so that you benefit from newer software versions.
At the time of writing this guide I used version 22.04 of Ubuntu LTS (also known as Jammy Jellyfish). It was first released in April 2022, as indicated by the release number.
If you are a going to be using Ubuntu then it is wise to subscribe to a few mailing lists. There are lots of them, but a few low volume ones like these are a good idea:
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- Low-traffic announcement list for notifications of security updates for Ubuntu
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- Low-traffic Ubuntu Announcements
I also opt to use an installation image which uses the MATE desktop system -- at the bottom of that linked website is a note about why it is called MATE (pronounced mat-ay). The MATE window manager is intuitive, efficient, skinny, dependable and popular. It is widely available on most flavours of Linux. MATE is not flashy, but it gets the job done.
Even though we are creating a home server, it is useful to configure the server to provide a remote graphical desktop environment -- this is why in this guide we use the desktop image rather than the server image. Then you can use the desktop for fun, learning, or perhaps as your Linux development environment from other devices. Accessing the desktop remotely is also documented in this guide.
This installation image still uses the X.org display server instead of Wayland, partly because it uses MATE which is not yet ready for Wayland at this Ubuntu LTS release, and also because this build is for the Raspberry Pi, where Wayland support is new. Moreover remote desktop support is a work in progress for Wayland environments, and is better left to the X.org protocol for now.
Footnotes
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Ubuntu Advantage is also known as Ubuntu Pro. It is free of charge for personal use on up to 5 machines. ↩