Why would a company like GitHub choose Ubuntu over Debian? The LTS policy?
I'm honestly interested in what the valid reasons to prefer Ubuntu over Debian (particularly on the server side) are.
I'm pretty dedicated to Debian on the server, a good part of my business is providing infrastructure support and setup, and I work from a MacBook Pro.
They're both pretty awful due to their automagic(al tendency to break down in mysterious ways), but if I have to choose, I'll go with Ubuntu.
Disclaimer: My main box runs Gentoo and I own no Mac machines, if that changes anything in your vision of Ubuntu users.
Those two are in opposition: Debian (generally) has new-enough packages, but it's stable, which is what one wants on a server system. Meanwhile, Debian's LTS story is better than Ubuntu's: just upgrade, and know it will work.
> easier to get non-free firmware/drivers
But how often is that needed for server systems? And of course, there're the ethical & engineering issues with using proprietary software in the first place.
> seemingly more support from third parties
There is that, but if we all wanted more support from third parties, we'd have stuck with Windows, no?
> They're both pretty awful due to their automagic(al tendency to break down in mysterious ways)
I've not experienced that with Debian in a long time. I used to have issues with Ubuntu, but I don't think that they were generally all that bad. Better than what I used to experience with Macs and Windows back in the 90s, anyway.
This is a leading word. As is a lot of that paragraph. For many tools some companies use, Debian certainly is NOT "new-enough" with many package choices. Nor is Ubuntu inherently NOT "stable" - and still trails a little behind the leading edge. As for upgrades, I've watched many a server upgrade seamlessly from 10.04 LTS to 12.04 to 14.04. I'm sure there can be and has been many a person, many a thread who've not had seamless experiences. But the same applies for Debian - heck, even the release manual has a section entitled "How To Recover A Broken System" with reference to system upgrades.
"non-free firmware/drivers"
How often needed? In this article alone, IPMI, BMC, RAID, BIOS.
"And of course, there're the ethical & engineering issues"
This is a derailment. What exactly are the ethical issues for a closed source company in using other proprietary software?
I'm by no means an Ubuntu fanatic. It has its share of issues, absolutely. I have everything from FreeBSD to Debian to RHEL to OmniOS to administer, and they all have strengths and weaknesses.
Also Dell's maintenance tooling barely works on Ubuntu at all; they don't even officially support their OpenManage stack on it. And forget about online firmware upgrades.
Maybe they'd actually used them before.
CentOS is a turd of a distribution, I'm certain the only reason it has any marketshare is because it's the only supported "free" OS for cPanel/WHM which a lot of web hosts provide for non-technical customers.
What's the matter with it?