Since Debian is the pure version of Ubuntu there shouldn't be much if any learning curve - but if you really don't get on with it, I'd suggest Mint over Ubuntu. Mint is a Ubuntu derivative by a team that respects users more than Canonical does.


Regarding rolling release, Debian Testing & Unstable branches may be considered rolling, but Debian Stable is not - any time someone says simply "Debian" without qualification, they're almost certainly referring to Debian Stable.

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Just for the record, we use Ubuntu in all production servers and we're happy with it. While I do respect at least some of the arguments that were put forth here, I don't really agree with this condemnation of Ubuntu. I think they've done a lot to make Linux better (yes, there's no comparison to Red Hat, sure) and to make it more attractive especially for end users. Without them Linux as desktop wouldn't have been take into consideration to such extent. We're still talking about a small market percentage, but there's been clear visible progress on which we can all agree. And that's partially thanks to Canonical.
Yes, at some point they did dubious things related to amazon, but that ended in Ubuntu 16.04, so it's more than 4 years since then (not that I would start trusting Microsoft, for instance, on the same principle, just because they're now contributing to open source projects). Makes you wonder a little, but at the same time Canonical also probably listened to the community, so that's not bad.

I wonder what closed-source das schwache Auge refers to exactly. Sometimes this a reasonable compromise for a better desktop user experience, if that means attracting more users to Linux. As far as the server version is concerned, I doubt there's any closed-source software, but I would be interesting in finding out what he's referring to.
The GUI of Ubuntu is also quite nice. I would say much nicer than the vanilla Gnome offered by Debian or Fedora - which is like a sort of silly derative of mac OS style. It's as if someone made an effort nonetheless to be original, and ended up with a non-friendly hybrid.

@boughtonp Yes, Mint in production servers would be absolutely amazing!

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This sounds interesting..
I'm on fedora to, on my latops. I've tried numerous Distros but just love Fedora.
I'm curious to see what else will Red Hat pull out (literally out of the hat) to make me leave Fedora.

One of the reasons I switched from Ubuntu Server LTS to CentOS 6 in 2013 was the 10 year EOL! Last year I upgraded to CentOS 8 since we changed all our physical servers.. I was happy I would not have to upgrade again until 2029... Red hat had other plans.. lol

Do you guys think RHEL will stop sponsoring Fedora project in favor of CentOS stream?

No idea.. but their move to CentOS Stream leaves me insecure about what will happen to Fedora.

The community should have seen it coming the minute RHEL acquired Centos.
It is straight out of the gates' "What?! Ethics?!" playbook.

yes, me too. I use Fedora as my daily driver at home. I switched my laptop to Debian Mate after the CentOS news broke out. Perhaps, I should stop using Fedora and moved to Debian.

Actually I don't blame anyone who didn't see it coming. CentOS was part of very important project, it seemed robust for a lot of people. Retrospectively, yeah, it seems easier to say it NOW. I don't think I for one would have said it would happen, even if I had read attentively what Red Had was planning to do with CentOS, when they took over. I just happen to use Ubuntu on most of the productive servers, but I could easily have ended up in the same boat as others who've already migrated to Centos 8. (who still have plenty of time to see what happens with Rocky, or the CloudLinux alternative).

The CloudLinux RHEL clone got a name, AlmaLinux.

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Shame the AlmaLinux website was built by an incompetent newbie. :/

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I don't think that is correct. It is more a question of IBM buying Redhat than Redhat supporting CentOS.

Companies like IBM and Oracle kill projects like DarkStar, DTrace, Drizzle, Fuji, GlassFish, GridEngine, Hudson, JXTA, Lustre, MySQL, NetBeans, ODFtoolkit, OpenDS, OpenESB, OpenJDK, OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, OpenSSO, Pymonkey, VirtualBox, Wonderland, WebSpace Server, ZFS and now CentOS for reasons that make sense from their viewpoint.

This is not because they are evil but that they have well-defined reasons to buy companies. They want a near-term economical effect. They take over the customer-base of a competitor and destroy the competitor in one step, secure patents and usage-rights of well-known brands and so on. They would not do that in any case when then think it is not worth it (for them).

Most of these open projects are then ancillary cost for them or like in the case of CentOS even "internal competition". Redhat had a completely different way to treat the community before it was bought by IBM and that it put more effort in CentOS was good for CentOS -and- RHEL.

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You just made my point.

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CentOS was the community support version that was limited to the open source for RHEL, A community led by some excellent developers and maintainers started it, and when RHEL took over my understanding (flawed perhaps) was that the commitment was to continue it as an unsupported but bit and flaw perfectly compatible RHEL clone supporte=d by the community.

I take this event as a betrayal of that community.

I do NOT take this event as a major issue. Big companies who use RHEL for production and CentOS for lesser support development and testing can simply add RHEL licenses and drive on. Smaller companies may have to shift to Rocky Linux (when available) or find another free or cheap option and move off of RHEL. I always saw CentOS as a no-cost leader to adopting licensed RHEL, since you could do a workup or proof of concept on CentOS and KNOW it would work the same on the same version of RHEL if/when it went to production. The new CentOS Stream will NOT serve any of those purposes that I used CentOS for professionally. That said, I will find or build a solution that will serve: that is, after all, what we do for a living.

I suspect this will make RHEL slightly less profitable for IBM, but not enough that either the RHEL teams or the IBM beancounters will care.


Life goes on.

wpeckham I agree with you 100%. Big corporations that already have RHEL and CentOS will probably just shift their CentOS servers to RHEL and be done with it.

Small companies like the one I work for, depended on CentOS to provide Enterprise level solution at no cost. I see Debian as a strong candidate to replace our CentOS servers.