Way back in 1992, a friend handed me a set of floppy disks labelled “Linux Boot” and “Linux Root” and said, “You're a computer guy; see if you can make this work.” It was described as a new operating system that was like a free version of Unix and would change the world. Shortly after, I was introduced to Slackware, then Debian, and soon Redhat took over my life.
Fast forward three decades, and the Linux lineage is extremely impressive to see in a timeline. There is a massive community of supporters and developers and a wide range of distributions to choose from, depending on your particular need.
This was one of the questions we had around the Kumo Corp card table when deciding what Operating Systems we would support. When considering the target market, it was clear that Linux distributions were the overwhelming favourite of our audience, but within that group, the choice of distro varied. Ubuntu and Rocky Linux came up in conversation often, but so did Alma and Debian and a range of lesser-known names. We clearly needed to build in a way that would accommodate the broadest range of platforms.
In the end, we chose to create installable repos for Ubuntu, CentOS and Rocky but also provide source install instructions for almost any version of Linux. We also prioritized deploying in a container, so if you use Docker and/or Kubernetes, you could manage it that way as well. There is a current list of tested Operating systems in our documentation.
What about Windows? Sure, ok, if you want to run it in Windows, we can do that too, but it is not directly in the Windows OS, and you are very unlikely to see the same level of performance you will get from running it in a pure Linux OS. With Windows, you can try KumoMTA in 2 different ways.
- Use Docker Desktop and install with the Docker deployment instructions.
Use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and install following the Ubuntu 20.04 guide.
This could be helpful if you want to run some tests on your PC, but we do not recommend running any production volume with Windows.
The Linux community has come a very long way since the days of Boot/Root floppies, and there are now SO MANY active distributions that we’ve had to limit our testing a bit. If you manage to get KumoMTA running on a distro not already on our tested page, we’d love to hear from you.