I've always been a fan of Debian-based distos over Red Hat based, so I've been quite happy to see the shift from Red Hat to Ubuntu in my career as a Linux admin(the shift away from Red Hat is stronger on the web side, but its happening across many server types).<p>On Debian vs Ubuntu, I'm actually preferring Ubuntu these days because the LTS release cycle is just much more predictable(but don't do prod servers until LTS.1) and it's easy to get a life cycle in place. It's also much easier to get third part software prepackaged for Ubuntu in versions that may not have shipped with your LTS version. They may work for Debian too, but I've had more luck getting Debian only versions working on Ubuntu than Ubuntu only versions on Debian. Probably because the Debian-only versions are more likely to be thoughtful of Debian derivatives.