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There is a bad smell arround his dead.

RIP!

Debby already left the building long ago

Who knows if we now get a Sallian distribition, or whatever his current girlfriend is called

I like Debian for stable servers, but for production/development I prefer Fedora, much more current.

Ubuntu server is the one for your server (or rh-el (not free) or oel from oracle (not free, but cheaper than rh)), if you want to keep it minimal, stable & reliable!

For your desktop I would recommend [k|l]ubuntu but not fedora, that rpm-package-management is killing me, also true for rh-el

Debby already left the building long ago

 

Who knows if we now get a Sallian distribition, or whatever his current girlfriend is called

 

I like Debian for stable servers, but for production/development I prefer Fedora, much more current.

Please don't be offended, but people who are using or recommending Ubuntu on their production servers, I can't see as knowledgeable professionals.

I'm not offended but who's talking about production servers? I wouldn't dare to use debian or ubuntu for production servers... There are better distributions available for use on production servers and with proper support.

What's wrong at using Debian in production servers? I use it all the time. Sure, Debian is not bleeding edge, even when using xxxx-backports, but it's 100% stable and secure. Never had problem with it.

Exactly. Also it's lean and mean. Ubuntu tends to be bloated. But in same cases the "proven technology" of Debian just won't do and then I prefer Fedora. Ubuntu is designed with novice users in mind. That's not what you want in a professional environment.

Bullshit, Fedora is a desktop distribution. If you want a (free to use) rh-production-server you use centos. The counterpart of Fedora is Ubuntu, the counterpart of centos is ubuntu-server (or debian (I think), in your case).

Exactly. Also it's lean and mean. Ubuntu tends to be bloated. But in same cases the "proven technology" of Debian just won't do and then I prefer Fedora. Ubuntu is designed with novice users in mind. That's not what you want in a professional environment.

mind your words please!

It isn't that simple, and not really comparable.
 
CentOS is the open-source version of Redhat Enterprise Linux. On average, a fedora release is 2 to 3 generations newer than RHEL. So you could compare CentOS to a debian-stable, both are not very up to date (usually).
 
And that is the danger of these distro's, if you want to use them, you most likely have to update installed packages. For example, RHEL 6 ships PHP 5.3.3, RHEL 7 ships 5.4.16, and Debian Jessie 5.6.9 (in 8.2), all horribly out of date, debian doing better here for a change. And if you install external packages, like with OpenPLi, you endanger the stability of the entire platform.

The advantage of running Fedora is that you're more up to date, and you run Redhat supported software, which is currently under development, so issues are fixed easily. I ran into an Apache bug with RHEL 7.1 about two months ago, and had to wait until the first week of december, when 7.2 was released. CentOS only recently went to 7.2. With big production issues are a result. So far for stable versions...

Obviously you need to know what you're doing, and install Fedora for server use, not for desktop use. So as bare as possible.

@WanWizard: I agree with you except one thing: PHP 5.6 is not "horribly out of date". 5.6.0 got released August 2014.

In Debian ecosystem, if you really need something newer, you can always grab the source package from testing or sid and backport it yourself. Or ask to be included in xxxx-backports. For example, I needed a newer version of strongswan (5.3.x) and Jessie still has 5.2.x . It was quite easy to get the source package from Debian Testing and builld the debs for Jessie.

I used to use Ubuntu on some asterisk/freepbx servers a few years ago, till an upgrade broke completely the mysql library - making asterisk crashing now and then. And while same bug existed back then on Debian as well,  it was fixed immediately on Debian while waiting for months to be fixed on Ubuntu. I never used Ubuntu again for servers after that incident.

Gosh, you had a very disappointing experience with ubuntu and with debian and your conclusion was that you didn't want to use ubuntu ever again. I'm sorry to hear that...

But you know that ubuntu uses debian sources for their distribution and, yes, ubuntu also has a testing environment to fix bugs and add features.

And if all fails you can grab source packages and build it yourself! Then you are no longer dependend of the maintainers for your (beloved) distribution!

@WanWizard: I agree with you except one thing: PHP 5.6 is not "horribly out of date". 5.6.0 got released August 2014.

Agreed. I saw the 8.2 version later, and added it, but forgot to change the rest of the line. 5.6 is acceptable. Sorry about that...

The problem I have with "testing" or "third-party" repositories is that using them undermines using a "stable" OS distribution, as you taint it with potentionally untested and buggy version.

Always a double-edged sword...

Catastrofus, both WanWizard have been systems administrators for a loooooong time and believe me, we do know all traits of all current Linux distributions. And Ubuntu just isn't the first choice for a server. I must say that Fedora keeps getting more and more christmas-tree features, but you still can choose not to install any of it and then you will have a very decent and always up to date server distro. Which of course also has it's drawbacks.

Gosh, you had a very disappointing experience with ubuntu and with debian and your conclusion was that you didn't want to use ubuntu ever again. I'm sorry to hear that...

But you know that ubuntu uses debian sources for their distribution and, yes, ubuntu also has a testing environment to fix bugs and add features.

And if all fails you can grab source packages and build it yourself! Then you are no longer dependend of the maintainers for your (beloved) distribution!

You didn't really read what I wrote. Time required to fix a reported bug is a very important factor. On the mentioned bug, Debian upstream had fixed the issue immediately while for Ubuntu it took some months (!!!) for them to fix.  Of course what I did was to manually build the package with the fix applied - I didn't waited for months. But that incident resulted in never using Ubuntu again. After all, it doesn't offer (server side) anything better than Debian. And Canonical has an agenta I am not willing to follow (upstart, Unity, Mir).

I have to say I'm slightly biased in this discussion, I'm using Redhat since version 5 or 6, sometime late '90's.

And as a result I always feel uncomfortable with other distro's (like Debian or Suse) since a lot works different, is configured different, and is stored in different locations. In the end you have to make a choice between "old == stable" and "new == unstable", unless you have the time, patience and knowledge to cherry-pick and build from source like Malakudi and deal with unstable issues that way (which I haven't ).

I was using Redhat till it switched to RHEL (around 2002 I think). When they decided to take that route, I switched to Debian.

Now that Debian is also systemd compatible, I am tempted at trying Fedora Server.

At home I use Fedora (since Red Hat version 2 in 1992 or so, there was no Ubuntu around then ) and at work Debian, exactly, imho, like it should. Fedora for bleeding edge up to dateness, Debian for max. stability and both can be installed in a very bare bones / clean way, that is what counts for me.

BTW switching to systemd is "steep" slope to take, but you won't regret it. It's a new world on it's own and many things that were complex to implement or stuff never implemented in a truly good way implemented stuff (/etc/init.d/...) are now a piece of cake. Like systemd as init never looses processes, whereas other init systems easily loose processes forked from daemons.