This is a little off-topic but to me there's no significant differences among the main general-purpose Linux distros. I help manage a ton of a mixed RHAT, Cent

This is a little off-topic but to me there's no significant differences among the main general-purpose Linux distros. I help manage a ton of a mixed RHAT, Centos, Debian and Ubuntu servers and the day-to-day operations are the same; we just install apt in the RHAT-based servers since it's nicer (sure, there's the chkconfig vs rc-update and /var/log/secure vs auth or mail.log vs maillog, big deal). I'd install or recommend one or the other based mostly on the versions of the applications (apache, postgres etc) that are packaged, if anything. Otherwise I say go with what you are familiar with or what your friends/staff are familiar with. That's on the server side. On the desktop distros (which I don't use much) it's almost the same. I spent a few years moving from distro to distro and I came to the conclusion that the difference between a new and a previous release of the same distro can be bigger (for me) that the difference between two current distro versions, so again it doesn't matter or rather any little thing can tip the balance to decide one distro or another. It comes to a point where I install say Ubuntu in my laptop and WiFi doesn't work and I just install RHAT or whatever; it's faster to do a re-install with another distro than to troubleshoot the problem.