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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I just did a quick survey of seven coworkers who are all familiar with the Linux, in order of likelihood of deploying in a commercial environment, the three distros that they indicated would recommend:

o CentOS - which is pretty bog standard for large web environments that are RPM Based that need to, for whatever reason, stay close to the RHEL platform.

o RHEL - For anybody who needs RedHat Support, or needs to be able to tell Oracle (or other enterprise vendor) they are running on a supported platform. Or they are just PHBs that need the comfort of deploying "Supported" environments.

o Ubuntu - This is a bit of an outlier, but we have a number of Debian Snobs who have a preference for the apt/dpkg/deb way of doing things, and Ubuntu, particularly LTS, seems to have some mindshare here.

Nobody mentioned Suse, though this is in Silicon Valley, and I get the sense that Novell doesn't have as much presence here.

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This is anecdotal evidence but in western Europe[1] Ubuntu Server seems to be vastly more popular than either CentOS or RHEL.

[1] With the exception of Germany, where SUSE Enterprise appears to be most popular.

in the German startup area it's all about Ubuntu/Debian and maybe some centos/gentoos.

I guess only the big old customers stick with SuSE. I don't know a single person anymore using SuSE…

I've recently helped to install a new server farm for a media company. We've choosen Ubuntu 10.04 LTS + chef (opscode) + REE + kvm.

We recently started to migrate a number of CentOS servers to Ubuntu LTS.

We found that stability to be on par with CentOS, with the primary advantage of Ubuntu being that we have more up to date packages in the main distribution.

We have a number of people running Ubuntu on their workstations which was another benefit of "unifying" the underlying platforms.

BTW, yes apt is awesome

Are you using Canonical's Landscape thing? It seems that with every release they actually make something useful for the server deployments, not just fluff features.

I have zero experience in deploying Linux in a commercial environment, only home / hobbyist usage; but I wonder why Ubuntu is ahead of Debian?

(I assume we're not talking desktops here.)

Maybe commercial support is easier to get? That would be a biggie for a business. Possibly more up to date packages? I am just speculating though.

Enterprise linuxes avoid many of the Debian ideals like the plague. On Debian, you are required to make a gajillion choices and to some extent are responsible for piecing together a competent system yourself; on RHEL and Ubuntu, you make a few, and retain the power to drill down and make choices, but you always start with the same solid template (roughly)

Debian is great for one or two machines, but based on my experience with it I can't imagine using it for 10,000 boxes

I mostly see thing the other way: for a machine or two, especially a desktop, Ubuntu is great. It made a bunch of decisions for me in advance that are mostly good, and I can override them if I need to. For a datacenter full of servers, I probably have a very specific configuration in mind and don't want anything extra. Debian seems most suited to that scenario.

Most of the time, with disk space as cheap as it is now the extra stuff isn't even worth the time spent deciding what to keep.

As for requiring a very specific configuration, most of the time that is only in one corner of the machine. I would even hazard that if you have strict requirements for every facet of the machine that differ from the defaults (and this machine is not handling super-sensitive information, super-high performance jobs, or publicly accessible) then you are doing it wrong.

I don't see it as a disk space issue. Extra stuff installed inherently means more exposure to potential security issues. That's undesirable.

I started running debian back in 2000 or so, and was happy with it for a while, but now I've mostly converted to ubuntu LTS releases on the server.

I find that debians support cycle for stable is troublesome for long lived servers, as the support lifetime is unknown, other than it's a year past the release date of the next stable version. That means that the minimum lifetime before needing to recheck everything for stability is one year plus however long until they release a new stable.

In contrast, ubuntu is at 5yr support for their longterm releases, with a known 2 year cycle in-between. Which means that even if you install in the worst possible time in the cycle, a new install will be supported for three years.

I really like those extra two years of security updates.

(edit for iPad text entry)

I think I've heard that Suse is more popular outside the US?

In any event, another good reason for running RHEL is when there' a legal requirement that you can't use "freeware". Mostly the place I'm at develops on CentOS and then pays Red Hat for what we ship simply because then we'll have paid someone for what we ship.

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