I'm not sure why you're throwing Gentoo under the bus when its upgrade system is completely different. There is no "time to upgrade" because there are no releas

I'm not sure why you're throwing Gentoo under the bus when its upgrade system is completely different. There is no "time to upgrade" because there are no releases to upgrade to -- you just install new versions of the software you happen to use when they come out and you feel like it. My own experiences with keeping my Gentoo systems up-to-date have been considerably more enjoyable than keeping my Ubuntu systems up-to-date. (I can no longer keep my GUI-reliant Ubuntu systems up-to-date because they're still using 10.04 as I refuse to "upgrade" past Gnome2. So it was bye-bye Ubuntu for me for new installs.) I agree with jcastro that Ubuntu Server is good, it's easy. It's a popular choice for Amazon ec2 images. It also represents a different mindset in system administration compared to the classic one that went like "Install CentOS version X and keep it for 5 years, sure the software is old as crap even when version X just came out and we hope we can apply security patches without needing a whole new version that depends on something the package manager can't provide, but it's stable!!!" (Just for fun I googled "centos packages old as crap" and this popped up as the first link. http://scalability.org/?p=6270 http://scalability.org/?p=6270 Notice how it's from two months ago? It's not a new phenomenon either.)