Introducing new distros to solve the problem is moving in the wrong direction. It's so much easier to deal with one distro in the cloud. Just more reasons not to go multi uArch.

To the downvoter...

I strive for simple infrastructure.

ARM doesn't support the x86 docker eco system. That's a significant strike but not totally unworkable for me.

My primary database isn't prepackaged with the ARM packages nor does the originating org build one. I could build it myself, which I have done plenty over the years. I did try it, but the dependencies aren't up to date on ARM. So now I'm building dependencies and the software package. Building software from scratch can be a rabbit hole that eats untold amount of time. After a one-day effort I gave up and abandoned it. I'll revisit again if Hetzner brings Ampere to the US and I can verify the instances have much higher IOPS ceilings.

Enter another distro and I have to rebuild all of my provisioning and management scripts for all my services with all the testing entailed in the new dependency chains. I'd rather try to build my db from source again, frankly.

ARM cloud hosts typically run distros with good ARM support. Oracle Linux is actually quite good, kinda like a pre optimized RHEL.

Which begs the question: what is Hetzner pushing on these? SUSE maybe?

By default: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Rocky and Alma.

You can mount your own ISOs though.

alpine brings it's own issues with the different libc

maybe things have been fixed now, but about a year ago I was having issues with ruby bugs that were due to differences between muslc and gnulibc