yeah, debian is very stable and reliable but not very cutting edge. It isnt very newbie friendly either as theres no GUI tools, graphical installer or LiveCD mode. Ubuntu is the opposite. Its a cutting edge debian.

There the same distro at the core in the they both use .deb/apt package management.
(generally) ubuntu is based off of the development version of debian (sid)

Generally:

debian = servers
ubuntu = desktop

News to me...
http://goodbye-microsoft.com/


I had literally no problems setting up Debian on my MacBook, although there were many drivers that needed installation. My biggest gripe against Debian is its hardware detection as compared to Ubuntu, but once that's taken care of, it's actually quite easy to use. Of course, you know this since you've used Debian so much, but this is my opinion.

i personally prefer debian to ubuntu as i like to do a netinstall and build a stripped down, custom system but i was generalising

Gentoo is hard to configure. for hard core linux users gentoo is better, but for newbies, ubuntu is a good starting place.

i installed ubuntu on my main home pc today - works great apart from small gfx card driver issue

Personally I think both of these distros kick ass. But it depends on what you want to use your system for as to which I would use. I personally use Gentoo as my server, and I use Ubuntu as my desktop. Ubuntu has excellent hardware detection (for goodness sake I plug in my Sansa and it opens Rhythmbox for easy drag and drop), but Gentoo has it's use flag functionality that enables certain functions to be compiled into the programs at compilation instead of having everything under the sun as in Ubuntu or pretty much any other binary based distro. Basically the main differences between Gentoo and Ubuntu is whether you would like to have a source based package manager to be able to have that functionality, or you want a binary package manager to have all program functionality enabled and fast installs at the trade of having too much bloatware and options that you will probably never use. Honestly I would pick Ubuntu for every Linux user that isn't an extreme expert because it's easy for installation, fast at installation, and overall very easy to maintain in comparing to Gentoo. Gentoo is an excellent distro, but to install it takes several hours (possibly days depending on what all you want installed) and sometimes it can uninstall packages when doing an upgrade that is dependent on another package (if you don't know how to handle this, it can be VERY frustrating - glibc did this to me and I couldn't open Amarok for 3 weeks and all I had to do was uninstall the old glibc). I have been using Ubuntu for about a week now and already I am exactly where it took me 6 months to be in Gentoo.

I wouldn ever use gentoo for a server after that incident a few years ago (the one where apache got so broken that you needed to reinstall the system)

Hmm, maybe I should reconsider using Gentoo as my production webserver then.... I have had that problem too, but I thought I had just done something wrong in the config files....apparently not, since you have had the same problem.

I assume this is related to the problem you were experiencing.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/apache-upgrading.xml

I wouldn't be so quick to throw it away. As far as I can tell, this issue has been resolved. And Gentoo is very stable; I've set up a Gentoo server and it's worked almost perfectly (granted, it's not running 24/7, but still that's saying something).

Ubuntu's also a decent server, especially for those who don't want a lot of configuration to get the server up-and-running. I have a friend who runs an Ubuntu webserver which has been extremely stable, however, there have been some issues previously with getting the virtual host directives set up correctly. I still don't have a clue what went wrong.

My redhat system has been running nonstop on my server since 2001. Has been rebooted only 24 times in 6 years (for updates)