most commonly used Linux version?

[Jeffrey Watts]

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 3:05 PM, Jonathan Hutchins
<hutchins at tarcanfel.org>wrote:

> Debian, on the other hand, is probably the most used Server OS, excluding
> the
> above enterprize environment.  When the IT staff have chosen the distro
> instead of Marketing or Management, the server run Debian.  It's
> upgradability, reliability, and long-term stability are second to none.
>

What an amazing blanket statement - one that I've never seen born out by
facts.  I suppose saying "IT staff" is vague enough to include the 18 year
old high school graduates that some small businesses are forced to entrust
their sysadmin duties, or the developers that like to run Ubuntu on their
servers because that's what's on their laptops.

As a professional system administrator I can say for a fact that Debian is
one of the worst choices for a server OS in a business environment.  Very
few ISVs certify their applications for it.  Very few hardware vendors
provide tier1 support for it, nor do they test their hardware and drivers
for Debian.  Debian's position on "non-Free" software means that it simply
doesn't work out of the box on a lot of commodity server hardware.

I noticed that you put in a disclaimer about "excluding the above
enterprize[sic] environment", but I find it laughable that you're
marginalizing the most important use of Linux in a server role.  I suppose
we should qualify what a "server" is.  Are you referring to the Pentium 3
Lenny boxes serving up MP3s in someone's basement?  I would think in the
context of this conversation we're referring to Servers.  As in, non-PC
hardware doing "real work" for businesses, government, and education.

There are only two real players in this arena:  Red Hat and SuSE.  Ubuntu
wants to be there, and who knows, maybe it will be in a few years.  But
right now it lacks both the support infrastructure and vendor/ISV support to
be a serious player.  Debian isn't even on the same planet.

When I'm working on supported hardware using a supported OS, I rarely need
to make support calls to the vendor.  However, when I do, I need expert
level help.  Who's going to provide that for me for Debian?  When I call Red
Hat they have the support staff _and developers_ available to fix my
problem.  Novell does too (at least for the time being).  Ubuntu has a few
guys.  Who will answer the phone when Debian breaks?

A lot of the popular distributions are re-workings of Debian that use newer
> packages.  Ubuntu, Mint, and Arch are all based on Debian, as are many
> others.  Mandriva is the main Red Hat based distribution that's not
> affiliated with Red Hat.  SuSE uses the same package system as Red Hat, but
> is very different.  Gentoo and Slackware represent their own branches of
> the
> tree, with Slackware being one of the oldest.
>

SuSE is very similar to Red Hat in my experience.  Provisioning is the only
place where I find big differences (kickstart versus autoyast).  Almost
every other facet of system administration is very similar and it doesn't
take long to learn the differences.

Now, I would like to point out that I think Debian has a lot of value and
does a lot for the Linux community.  But I think your statements are a vast
overreach and aren't born out by my experience, and I've been working
professionally with Linux as a system administrator for 14 years and as a
user for 17.

Jeffrey.
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