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Do you mean for k8s nodes? or the host? We've used Debian for node pools and you can make it work, but SLESLeap Micro worked better for us. I would check https://www.suse.com/suse-rancher/support-matrix/all-supported-versions/rancher-v2-14-1/ this should answer any questions on whats officially supported. Reminds me we need to update..

I'm talking about the kubernetes cluster in general. I'm not sure what you mean by 'host'.

Debian is what many distros are based on, its the old reliable source but one of the issues is its often way behind and much slower moving - it is often more work to compile and pull together the components you need. Good luck - Im sure you can make it work if you want to, but if you want less friction I'd pick a supported distro.

Debian is indeed not tested and not supported

But is, on our clusters, the distribution that is in use. I've not noticed any issues that I can assign to it, just the general issues we all have. I think.

The issue we had was lack of NFS out the gate, it was simple to fix by installing it into the nodes as an addition, however were using Rancher with Harvester - so that becomes a problem when you want to scale / auto-scale as its anything CSI using RWX has trouble (suspect you'd have the same with any cloud driver), unless you can account for this another way, may have been possible with cloud-init for instance. This was why we moved away from it, it's definitely possible and it really depends on your use case. For instance - if your just a bare-metal cluster with rancher you'd be fine since you have more control i guess with your playbook and assuming your using something to provision the nodes you could manage this there - however you might have to. go through a few rounds depending on what your running in cluster. Worth also checking HW support for your chosen distro.

Yes, I agree. In my company Debian was already installed, so it is what it is. I generally prefer Debian, being fully OSS and generally much cleaner than the rest, but yeah 🙂 Thanks for your helpful responses.

and we're not against contributions on Rancher to get debian tested and verified... but it takes a commitment

Yes, i can imagine 🙂

Indeed. It is, perhaps, more difficult to distinguish since the OS is Linux all the way, it's just the distro that's different - sometimes quite dramatically different, admittedly. We don't (yet) have Rancher support, but the fact we're using Debian has been raised in conversations with them and we had the same sort of response - it should work, we see no reason why it won't, but we've done no testing on it, would you like to contribute? Thus far, we haven't.