Lately it seems to me Debian and Ubuntu have made some strange package decisions. They have morphed into a desktop oriented build with snap packages and auto-updates enabled by default (among other strange decisions). There's a ton of stuff we always end up disabling in the new release because it's super buggy and doesn't work well (I work at a small MSP). I'm not sure who replaced Ian Jackson, but Debian seems rudderless.

Centos was the rational other free choice, not that Red Hat hasn't made other equally strange decisions.

Sometimes I think we'd be better off rolling our own, like Amazon does.