Quickly wondering what people recommend as OS for a rpi model 4b, outside of the RaspPiOS ofc. I want to use the RPI for all networking related stuff (dont worry its not using an sd-card). So PiHole, and I’ll also want to use it as my exit-node out of my Tailnet. I will also run ProtonVPN on it so that all my devices indirectly use a vpn, as long as they’re connected over Tailscale. That’s at least what I had in mind so far, please do criticise the idea if there are better alternatives or solutions that you would recommend. I have been looking at running either Alpine or MicroOS. Or should I just go for a server based OS?
Appreciate any suggestions!
Dietpi
Go with MicroOS. SUSE’s products are criminally underrated for how well designed they are. Plus at some point you are bound to face a brick wall when trying to use software that is not musl compatible on alpine.
Armbian.
why
It comes ready for daily usage “out of the box”.
NixOS runs on a pi quite well and it’s pretty good for setting up self hosted services
Storage space might be an issue on smaller SDs but I haven’t run into that yet on mine
Yeah I really do want to get into NixOS, just not had the time to learn something so different quitr yet. Possibly after Christmas. Would really like to be running the same OS on all of my devices fro sure.
Try RISC OS first. It won’t do what you’re asking for, but it’s a super neat vintage OS!
Alpine. It’s crazy fast and you can run everything in Docker.
I’m currently running Alpine on my RPi4 as a host for some Dockers, including pi-hole and it works great! The setup is surprisingly painless and you’ll end up with some insanely fast boot time. Highly recommended !
It may be a bit minimal for your taste, but I wholeheartedly recommend Alpine. I’m currently running AdGuard and opentracker on a RaspberryPi 1B with Alpine edge, and the experience has been rock solid.
