Linux distributions recommendations for servers [closed]

Solution 1:

Red Hat Enterpise Linux or CentOS. They are stable, you can buy support for them if you care to, and every major release has a guaranteed 5 year support cycle, which is invaluable (don't even get me started on the Fedora server a semi-rogue administrator installed here that we now can't upgrade).

Also, it tends to be the supported solution when installing commercial software on Linux (Oracle comes to mind, but we have other commercial products that state they'll install on anything, but they will only guarantee interoperability with Red Hat/CentOS).

Solution 2:

Debian or Ubuntu (server) due to dist-upgrade. Any distro can be installed from scratch - but how many can be upgraded in place? I've got a debian machine that hasn't been reinstalled from scratch since approximately 1995.

There are good communities around both, and also good documentation on making your own packages so you can make the package system work for you personally. It's Very Cool to be able to easily roll a custom package to deploy to your internal machines.

Getting the most up-to-date versions of software can be a challenge, but backports have filled that gap pretty well.