Not if you want prompt fixes to the current spate of Rails bugs. As I write, Ubuntu currently has the fix for the last remote code execution vulnerability in R

Not if you want prompt fixes to the current spate of Rails bugs. As I write, Ubuntu currently has the fix for the last remote code execution vulnerability in Rails marked as being of "undecided" importance, and still "unassigned", even though rails-core shipped a patch weeks ago. This is remote code execution against any vulnerable app, which is pretty much as bad as it gets. Debian has a fix for the version of Rails 2.3 that they're shipping, but 2.3 is years obsolete, and officially unsupported upstream. Pointers on both: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rails/+bug/1097643 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rails/+bug/1097643 (comments in the Ubuntu issue reference the Debian fix.) There are things that the Debian and Ubuntu maintainers do well, but their packaging for Rails and the underlying Ruby language have both been problematic for quite some time, and their use is generally not recommended.