I’ve been running Asterisk for a while now and always considered CentOS the go-to OS for stable, production-grade deployments. It struck a great balance between community support and long-term updates — but now that CentOS has been deprecated, I’m not quite sure which direction to go.
I’m curious to hear what the community is currently using and recommending in 2025. Specifically:
Which Linux distro are you deploying Asterisk on today?
What has your experience been like in terms of stability, long-term support, and Asterisk compatibility?
Have you made the move to Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Debian, or something else entirely?
Any lessons learned or gotchas from real-world deployments?
I’m particularly interested in setups running in production environments — not just lab installs — so any insights from your actual use cases would be incredibly helpful.
I’ve been using Debian as the go-to server OS of choice for years, for Asterisk and other production uses, for a range of different clients. I think Asterisk was dropped from the standard package repo for (current) Debian 12, but it should be back in Debian 13 (which should be out later this year).
Debian does new versions about every two years, which may be a shorter support cycle than users of RHEL and the like are accustomed to.
Hi Levi, I’ve been using Rocky Linux for the past 3 yrs they have great support and have had no issues running Asterisk on it. Very solid build. I currently have 4 Servers running with Rocky 9.5 Rocky 10 has issues as it’s a new development.
There is currently no Asterisk in Debian 13. Asterisk is in Debian 11 and Unstable. Ubuntu, which is Debian based, does have Asterisk.
It is possible to install Asterisk from Debian 11 on Debian 12:
The alternative is to compile Asterisk from source.
Debian’s problem is lack of VoIP maintainers.
I’m surprised they didn’t debianise Certified. Certified has less changes per year and should therefore be easier to maintain.