There is a certain practicality in running the same thing on the server as on your developers' laptops.

Ubuntu and Debian are pretty similar, and using Debian gets rid of things like snap, which I'm glad to be rid of - but it adds an extra level of "well it works on my machine" which I'm not glad for.

If it's going to be hard to get that special different version of Java to work on the server, it should be hard to get it to work on the desktop too :)

Of course the rise of containers has made a lot of this stuff less relevant.