Ready meals, yeah?)<p>I do remember times when there were essentially two choices - Debian or RH. There was also Suse, but the madness of making everything look like Netware, with standard, classiesc UNIX tools replaced by some home-brew programs with dozens of parameters nobody knew. It died long ago, thank god.<p>The advantage of Debian was that it was de-facto standard academia linux. Which means more-or-less stable and well tested, while some designs were (and still) lame. apt is such a lousy mess compared to RPM.)<p>Then the wave of migration from proprietary UNIXes to cheap Linux systems began, and RHEL flourished, being the OS of choice if you wish to run Oracle or Informix (the second was very impressive and still is). RHEL at that time was actively developed, well-tested, and even went through a painful transition to NTPL.<p>Then good people made CentOS from RHEL's sources and nowadays it is still default choice for some stable, but little bit lagging behind the popular distros Linux (it is still on 2.6.x kernels)<p>Then was the raise of Ubuntu. Well, it is popular, which almost never mean good.) Nevertheless for the wast majority Linux = Ubuntu. Leaving aside the crazy habit of incorporation of any new shinny crap invented by freedesktop guys, such as various init, management and settings "services" it is quite stable, and well-tested, indeed. Btw, comparing to the glorious days of 2.4 to 2.6 migration, or that NTPL stuff, there are almost no problem with core libraries and tools.<p>So, does anyone need a new distro? My answer is NO. It is quite easy to reduce CentOS or even Ubuntu (or Fedora, which is also infected by systemd madness) to a minimal and stable set of packages. All you need to do is exclude all Gnome-related stuff with dependencies, keeping image and fonts manipulation libraries, and X11 libs to be able to recompile popular packages.<p>The key idea here is begin with already many times tested sources, such as CentOS .srpm (got through tests by two separate teams) or Ubuntu's packages, cutting off unnecessary dependencies. Then you will have compatible and well-tested OS for containers or whatever else sales people call the banal para-virtualization.<p>Setting up your own yum repository is a matter of few hours, Debian packaging is more messy, but manageable. This is what sysadmin's job all about.<p>Btw, vendors such as Amazon already have done this job, so if you hate system administration (which is a sign that shopping might be a better future ,) just re-use these images - it is much better than some new "core OS".<p>The so-called "minimal install" of Ubuntu is also fine, and all you need to do is re-compile important packages, such as MySQL the way you like it and place them to your local repo.