Debian is now the most popular Linux distribution on web servers

I haven't used RedHat-based distros for years now but I remember that back when I switched to Debian-based distros I was equally confused about Debian's package management system. I didn't think, and still don't think, that dpkg and apt are documented that well. To answer your question: yum is to rpm as apt is to dpkg. But I've always found it weird that there's a difference between apt-get and apt-cache; in contrast, "yum install" and "yum search" use the same executable. The documentation concerning building Debian packages is often out of date and scattered all over the Internet with no clear central place. And finally there's this "aptitude" thing; I still don't understand why it exists and how it's different from regular apt.

Basically my experience with Debian long ago as well. I have always thought the Debian packaging system was far superior to rpm and was glad to see Ubuntu take the Debian experience and bring it to the masses (although I still prefer straight up Debian for myself)

Your scanning vendor should know better and advise you properly. Just kidding, the "security" industry sucks.

Debian and other long term enterprise distributions backport fixes for these unacceptable security holes. A better solution is to simply turn off the minor version string as that's the extent of their testing.

I'd guess a good number of people intuitively do what you did. The problem is, instead of getting sucked in by a scheduled apt-get update, now you probably wont notice critical fixes until the next quarterly scan is due.

You could see if updated versions are in the Debian backports collection. You can pick and choose your updates via apt pinning.

I'm not sure it is. Speaking only from personal experience, we've canned all our Ubuntu LTS machines as they were terribly unreliable (kernel failures and wierd bugs on good hardware) and shipped broken packages regularly (mysql-server being the most notorious).

No problems at all with Debian so far.

Every 6 months, Ubuntu grabs the latest packages from Debian unstable. In contrast, it usually takes two years for new versions of software to move from Debian unstable to testing to stable.

I just aptitude upgrade'd to Sid/Unstable.

Though I made the switch too, I don't get your problem with packages. Debian uses Aptitude same as Ubuntu. It sounds like the problem you had with Debian was that you didn't have the sources you needed in your sources list.

I started with CentOS but found it difficult to maintain and set up. Then I switched to Debian because for some reason I felt pressure to not use Ubuntu. People often imply that Ubuntu is for bad programmers, inexperienced people, etc. It's kind of like "well, all the cool kids are using distro X because we're l33t and you're not cool because you use Ubuntu" so I stayed away from it for a while. Finally I ended up deciding that it was more important to just get a fucking app running on a server I could most effectively use. I'd been using Xubuntu and Crunchbang on my laptop for a while and so I made the switch and I'm very happy with it. I subsequently redeployed all my VPSes with Ubuntu 11.10 or 10.10 depending on what the hosts offered. I like it because not only is it the easiest for me to manage but it seems like its easier to find help for any problems you may run into and good documentation.

I say screw the hipster crowd who are too cool for Ubuntu and just focus on what's best for you. I think people like that are trying to convince themselves of how great they are more than anything else.

They say that Debian servers come from new servers, and many subsequentially change to Ubuntu. From the graph it's clear that CentOS and Debian is mostly steady, Ubuntu is on the rise and everything else is on the way down (in percentages of course).

I'm curious because I don't follow server distro updates often: what server-side stuff did Ubuntu improve on? I was under the impression that most of their gains were on new user experience as opposed to traditional administration.

You could also add debian and ubuntu, but I guess the connection is not quite as strong.

It definitely is. The upgrade path between major versions is significantly easier which is where it really hurts. Also, despite the Debian packages being a little older, they always just work and have sensible patches and defaults applied.

I'm not sure there are many completely objective reasons to choose one or the other. Things like release-cycle style and package layout come to mind. CentOS also has a different toolchain for some system management tasks like run-level management. Keep in mind that for everything you like about Debian, there maybe someone else who dislikes it. For example, some sysadmins would rather the Apache 2 package not create folders like sites-enabled/sites-disabled along with the associated tools.

It comes down to a matter of preference.

Some packages are more stable or up to date on CentOS than on debian, java, virtd and xen comes to mind. When I used the packages on Debian I needed to do some tweaking whereas on CentOS these things worked out of the box.

I got this idea that in general Debian is easier to manage but for all the 'Enterprizy' stuff CentOS has the edge.