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I have an affectionate place in my heart for Debian, the community is passionate, they have wonderful ideals, hell I even helped found a charity which distribut

I have an affectionate place in my heart for Debian, the community is passionate, they have wonderful ideals, hell I even helped found a charity which distributes it on used PC's discarded by large companies to disadvantaged people over 20 years ago which is still running today. It was my favourite distro for a long time after I moved on from Slackware in the late 90's, I used it at home, I used it in my job at a small ISP on everything from x86 to Sun Sparc to DEC Alpha hardware. We are lucky in the Linux community to have them. I could care less about deriatives like Ubuntu, seems to be one too far removed. But over the years the bikeshedding and some of the poor technical decisions started to wear on me. The debconf approach of asking a million questions on install bothered me. In my current job we use it on small industrial ARM PC's and it does a great job there at a large scale distributed over a wide variety of environments and geographical area, scorching heat, freezing cold and everything in between. But that's easy because it's a single system image which we deploy to hundreds of devices and it only requires minimal customisation to perform the required tasks. But our datacenter servers remain RHEL for the simple reason ... the deployment and broad customisation process per server is easy, LDAP integration is straight forward and the customer wants to pay for support from the vendor even though we never use it. Security updates and bugfixes are delivered quickly and the vendors commitment to stability is commendable. It's a no brainer. More and more companies started to move their workloads to RHEL once it came out and unfortunately it just didn't make sense to bother with distributions outside of RHEL/Fedora for my personal use anymore, some sort of work/life balance is needed and I don't want to spend my personal computing time remembering all the idiosyncracies between different Linux distributions anymore. I would argue that Debian is pretty idiosyncratic and opinionated if you have come from more traditional UNIX systems in the 90's, while RHEL/Fedora more closely model an "evolution" of those classic systems if you like. It will be interesting to see what happens to RHEL in the coming years as Redhat becomes more and more absorbed into the IBM environment.

finnthehuman 2y ago
That's the reality of deploying professionally though. I've got a soft spot for debian from using it for over 20 years too, but choosing open source often means picking the vendor that accommodates the use case. Many products have the enterprise upsell of good LDAP/AD integration but that's just a nice to have when you're really buy it for the ability to call someone when shit goes sideways. And when you don't need the support net, it's often gonna be ubuntu because that's what most people are comfortable with. Or yocto if you're shipping a custom OS. And containers are so ephemeral and purpose specific it means distro doesn't matter as much. I'm still rooting for them the most. They're community based, an important upstream, and stable has never done me dirty. It's still my go-to for "I don't want to think hard about, or worry about this system."

finnthehuman 2y ago

That's the reality of deploying professionally though. I've got a soft spot for debian from using it for over 20 years too, but choosing open source often means picking the vendor that accommodates the use case. Many products have the enterprise upsell of good LDAP/AD integration but that's just a nice to have when you're really buy it for the ability to call someone when shit goes sideways. And when you don't need the support net, it's often gonna be ubuntu because that's what most people are comfortable with. Or yocto if you're shipping a custom OS. And containers are so ephemeral and purpose specific it means distro doesn't matter as much. I'm still rooting for them the most. They're community based, an important upstream, and stable has never done me dirty. It's still my go-to for "I don't want to think hard about, or worry about this system."