The only graphical installed I've seen was the corporate 'build' of redhat, a 65 page mammouth document that talked about 'disabling telnet'. WTF? Why the hell

The only graphical installed I've seen was the corporate 'build' of redhat, a 65 page mammouth document that talked about 'disabling telnet'. WTF? Why the hell is telnetd even on the machine? They also had X on there -- on a frickin server. That's when I spent some time doing an ubuntu build, which even as of 16.04 is ncurses based installer. Boot from pxe, give an IP address/gateway/dns/hostname etc, approve the automatic partitioning selection, select which support area looks after the machine (for user generation, monitoring, etc), and that's it. Everything gets the same base install, including things like active directory based logons (with ssh keys for those who want them), automatically adds itself to nagios. Build a dev installation (which you select form pxelinux) and auto patching gets enabled, and syslogs get fired off the the right location. On a VM this can of course be passed as part of the creation process, so it just take 5 minutes to build from scratch. When it comes to building on real hardware it's just a matter of typing the stuff into the boxes then going and making a cup of tea. After the base install is on, you can then either apply an ansible script to do various package installs, or do it old-skool with apt-get install $package. It's entirely possible that debian testing may work, however from a corporate signoff (and when you've got nearly 2,000 of these machines installed you need that) saying you're basing the company on 'Ubuntu LTS' is far better than basing it on "Debian Testing". We've run this way for over a decade over 6 continents, it just works.