At Nemein we do maintenance for quite a few servers of our customers. While some customers have their own Linux distribution preference - usually RHEL - in most cases we have a say what distribution runs their servers. So far this has been debian, but now we're going for Ubuntu Server.

The reasons for this are quite simple:

• Ubuntu follows the same synchronized release model as Midgard does, offering a predictable upgrade schedule
• In many cases the stable Ubuntu version has newer PHP and GNOME packages than debian stable. As these are Midgard dependencies this makes our life easier
• Ubuntu is one of the distributions supported by the openSUSE Build Service
• Ubuntu is still basically the same familiar rock solid platform that debian is

While not everybody is happy about the way Ubuntu has established itself in the market, there seems to be a strong gravitation towards switching to it, on both desktop and server.