On Tuesday 16 May 2006 11:11 pm, Tim Link wrote: > I am finally going to upgrade my server running Fedora Core > 1 (I know, I'm behind the times) and was thinking about > using FC5. But, as I read the posts on this list, it appears > that Debian has found it's way into the hearts of many as > far as it being a preferred distro for servers. Why is this > the case? I truly am not into distro wars but was just > wondering if Debian has a better track record than the > others, longer up-times, etc. > > If the concensus is that it just really doesn't matter at > all which distro to use on a server, that will be enough for > me. Thanks. My observations/opinions Debian - Very stable. Runs a little older but trusted version of applications SuSE - Stable, good user interface application, fairly up to date. Have this installed on lots of servers Slackware - not much experience/exposure Fedora - same ubuntu - same Gentoo - my preferred distro. very flexible, very up to date, fairly stable (i dont have problems with it as a server or on my desktop for the last 4 years) Redhat enterprise - stable, fairly up to date mandriva - i used it back in 97-98 (it was called mandrake). it was a pretty decent distro back then, i expect it to have only gotten better. All in all i'd say all distro's are going to be close to the same for a server, with the possible exception of source based distros (gentoo, etc) since updating a packages usually takes a little more time since it compiles the package before installing it. Other than that, I would be that they are all pretty much the same overall. They all run the same kernel - yes, commonly with their own distro based modifications, but really, what differences are there to end users? They all run the same applications - difference primarily in installation/update method and where the files are stored on the filesystem. They all support the same hardware for the most part. For me it really comes down what included applications/management utilities are included in the distro. I choose Gentoo because it has an awesome application management system called portage based on FreeBSD's ports. Gentoo also has a tendancy to keep config files logically located in /etc (like the BSDs).