Migrate to different OS

I realize this an instant "Close, not gonnado", but just at least maybe take a look at some of the issues.

Last weekend I spent an entire day trying to get a 1 GB instance to run Ubuntu 26.04. I use two ISPs: Vultr and BuyVM.

The only way I got it to run on BuyVM was updating from 22.04, and there were several crashes before an install would magically complete.

The only way I got it to run on Vultr was with a brand-new instance. I haven't yet opened a support ticket to see if they will ever offer 26.04 to be installed by Vultr from an existing instance, though I can get 24.04 installed, I was unable to get 24.04 to successfully upgrade to 26.04, but I was running out of hours to try and get an upgrade to complete before crashing.

I could not get the direct upload ISO to install on either instance.

Ubuntu is on a clear trajectory to ever increase the memory required to run the OS, with current minimum requirements stated as 1.5GB and 1GB for "cloud", whatever that really means.

In time, Mail-in-a-Box will become a tool only used by professionals as hosting expenses become quite real, and, frankly, not worth the expense for a great number of us out here, especially if we are running more than one box. I am grateful and appreciate that many of the core contributors to the project are professional developers, as this is a skill I do not have. However, there can be some weakness here in recognizing the real expense a mail server presents the more average user of what I imagine is a large percentage of the running boxes.

Meanwhile, Debian still states a minimum of 512GB. I speculate that if the project were ever to seriously consider a different OS, this is the likely target as it would require fewer changes to the project.

Another aspect of the project has been the significant amount of highly scarce time dedicated to maintaining Nextcloud. Because this is core to the server, itself, it always takes priority over time that could be spent on new features. One way this could be offset is by using an OS that has Nextcloud available to be installed from repositories.

A current issue I have seen over the decades to be a constant in Debian-based systems is PHP version maintenance. While I find that the maintainer is genuinely doing the Lord's work with all of that, it nonetheless crops up every few years to add a lot of overhead to server management.

If you can't tell, I've made those last two points to bolster what will be probably not considered as a suggestion that I will suggest anyway, and that is move to OpenBSD. I have been using it for all my web servers for probably 7 years now, and overall it is substantially less headache than Ubuntu. The semi-annual system upgrades are actually very clean and predictable, but I realize most people are not familiar with the OS and of course opinions on which OS to use are, er, opinionated.