I use Ubuntu myself on my laptop which works very nicely. Also running it as a gateway machine at my girlfriends. For my own servers I still stick to Debian though

Open source doesn't mean no money. There are a bundle of open source products out there that you just have to pay for. Also providing support is something that can generate some cashflow . The money really isn't at the small home user but big cooperations who run linux on their whole desktop and serverpark do need implementation / support / training etc which companies make a bundle of. As you might know 80% of the total cost of ownership with hardware and software is generated in the "running phase". So if you can persuade someone to buy your product for almost free (for linux desktops) but you get paid for the support I think thats still a pretty sweet deal.

So why do you use Ubuntu for the laptop and gateway but Debian for your servers? What are the pros and cons of the two, especially as, as I understand it, Ubuntu is Debian-based?

(Edited by Ming 27/09/2005 23:05)

Well the gateway at my girlfriends only operates as a gateway to a very limited set of machine also it does nothing else particular important besides that and it operates as an internet terminal for me when I'm around and my GF is using her machine. My own servers at home are also heavily used as FTP / File / Printer / HTTP servers / Mail etc so stability is a major issue. Ubuntu however maybe Debian based is based on the unstable / testing branch of Debian while I only run Stable versions of Debian on my servers.

Ubuntu is really just the quick and easy fix when you don't really require major stability (although the gateway at my girlfriends has an uptime of 2 months+ at the moment, so even although the distro might be unstable it works pretty well). Normally my home servers run at an uptime of over 200+ days shamefully had to take them offline because I had some harddisks fail on me though.

So the reason I use Debian on my server really boils down to the stability issues as Ubuntu isn't as well tested as Debian stable, sure you have some aged packages but I really don't care that much if I have the latest version of the ftp daemon or not aslong as it is security patched and does its job and doesn't screw up my machine because of some dependency issues

(Edited by Chambler 28/09/2005 09:36)