This just in: it's an Ubuntu future. Think I'm nuts? Take a cold, hard look around. Even though I'm a fan of other delightful distros like Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux, there are other honorable mentions, such as Fedora (a fine distro) and OpenSuSE. At the end of the day, however, Ubuntu has won the hearts of common users. And that is not my opinion, this is simply a matter of numbers.
Full story »
pogson
17 years 12 weeks 6 days 7 hours ago
I have used Ubuntu in several installations.
I have used Ubuntu in several installations. It is not bad, has a great community, and great features, but, when I am serious, I will install Debian, because there are more packages, a bigger community, and they release when ready.
Last year I set up a whole school with Ubuntu and LTSP. Ubuntu was designed as a desktop system and I had to configure a bunch of things to work nicely with LTSP. For example, every user was checking printing status every second, making that a huge waste of CPU time on the terminal server. I decided to delete that function but could not find a simple way to adjust the frequency and the package management included that function with a bunch of useful things so I had to rename/delete stuff manually. That is a small example of why the "features" of Ubuntu may increase the problems of administering a system.
See http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/
If I were doing another large installation, the only plus I would give Ubuntu over Debian is that commercial support is available. I set up my system and left a newbie in charge with a 50 page manual. The only external support he needed was how to rewrite the boot loader when a hard drive failed in months of system operation, so I do not believe commercial support is needed if at least one person in an organization has some technical skill.