Debian server vs. Ubuntu Server [closed]

Question

I have an old pc standing around here which I want to build into a server. Nothing fancy, nothing to be running 24/7. What I want to do is run a few game servers which are only switched on by demand. (Minecraft, Counter-Strike, ...), run an apache web and tomcat application server for personal services and mainly for messing around. Eventually try and set up an LDAP environment at home. If everything runs fine, switch over to a "productive system" for our household. That's probably it. Now I'm looking for pros and cons that speak for or against Debian or Ubuntu distribution. I've already run both, I liked both very much. But they are pretty much alike. You do hear rumors though that one's faster and the other's more user-friendly with more software support. So I'm kinda in two minds about this. Just so you know, I know my way around linux pretty well and I've been running several distros since the last six or seven years, so my state of knowledge shouldn't be too much of a problem ;-)

Cheers, Beejay

Answer 1

My understanding of Ubuntu is that it is a sub-distribution of Debian. That is, Ubuntu is Debian just like CentOS is Red Hat or like lime-green is a type of green.

With this understanding, most of the differences are on the surface. There might be different default packages that it comes with, for example. But if you want to add something, on both you'll just do something like sudo apt-get install my-package. If you want a web server though, Ubuntu server installation asks you (at least it used to) if you want it to include LAMP services (Apache/MySQL/PHP on Linux), which sounds like what you want to start with. Debian server might also do that, I don't recall.

In the end though, especially if you're installing the server versions, there probably won't be much difference at all, especially after you get it set up how you want.