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Comment by adql | Hacker News Reader

I swear, every time some helpdesk Linux issue filters to us it ends up being "well, that worked fine in Debian, Ubuntu fucked something up"...

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If you are just starting out on your Linux journey, save yourself (possibly many) years of varying woe, and go straight to Debian.

> If you are just starting out on your Linux journey, save yourself (possibly many) years of varying woe, and go straight to Debian.

Debian is a great OS and still runs on some of my servers! However, what about the release/EOL cycle, which might affect some people's reasoning? Along the lines of: "I'll set this up and I want to keep it running reasonably for X years with unattended-upgrades."

Debian releases are supported for just a few years: https://endoflife.software/operating-systems/linux/debian

In contrast, Ubuntu LTS releases are around for about 5 years or longer (HWE): https://endoflife.software/operating-systems/linux/ubuntu

Technically you do have Debian LTS, but it's never mentioned anywhere as prominently like Ubuntu LTS is, which feels a tad odd (because it works fine): https://www.debian.org/lts/

Of course, many looked in the direction of something like CentOS for this, or RHEL, or Rocky Linux or Alma Linux etc., which are supported for around 10 years usually. In my experience, DEB distros play more nicely with most of the software that I want to personally run, though.

If you stick with Ubuntu LTS you have to put up with the bugs they never fix for longer!

The main point I should have included above is that Debian's installation and deployment of any given upstream package is generally better than other distributions (my opinion only, YMMV), especially when there are lots of dependencies.

I had that a while ago. MySQL in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was a complete fuck up with loads of upstream bugs that weren't patched out. Unfortunately company policy was only Ubuntu with system packages.

Eventually I persuaded them to let me use CentOS 6. What they didn't know is they ended up running Debian stable for the next 7 years thanks to a pact with the other sysadmins. Eventually it all went to AWS and Amazon Linux which is basically a uniquely fucked up version of CentOS.

Really I'd rather run FreeBSD but no one wants to pay me to do that.

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