Tried Ubuntu when it first came out.....went back to debian.....been running debian for over 5 years.....running sid which has fewer bugs then ubuntu if i recall, unbuntu was to introduce the masses to linux.....

Man, that's so true. This Kmuto installer, it is indeed a solution that I completely forgot. I saw that Kmuto had some slowling down with releases for a short time, maybe cuz of his book. In this debian forum, there some guys that fought hard with hardware and some stable, I recall .Maybe we could have adviced them kmuto, backport is very well known, but kmuto deserve very high respect and being better known. It is amazing his distros he makes


EDIT:
Short reply :
- we would be in very big ... troubles

I came from Ubuntu and went to Debian. Ubuntu is a little too buggy. I'm glad I made the change. Debian is a nice stable os that I can rely on.

which debian distro you use / kernel?

Frenchnoob, I am running Debian Sid with Liquorix kernel
very nice and not at all "unstable" to me
http://liquorix.net/

What makes you think the current stable version of Debian is any more out-dated than say the latest version of Windows will be by it's next release date? Neither one adds any "new functionality" to any updates that are made. Ubuntu sacrafices the quality of it's distro for the sake of the "all important" release date. I have heard it said that Ubuntu only averages a good, solid, stable release about 1/3 of the time. Hopefully, their move to using Debians testing branch (instead of using Debian's Sid (unstable)) will make it a better product. If I go by past experiance, Ubuntu has been no more stable (on the average) than any version of Windows I could name.

As for the original question, Debian plays host to over 200 parasite distros. Some of which seem very well thought out. Others, not so well. If all of the Debian Devs quit tomarrow, out of the 200+ distros sucking off Debian, only a small handful (4 or 5?) "might" survive. Ubuntu (from my knowledge of it) depends so much on Debian that it would fall flat on it's face nearly dead after 6 months. Another thing is that Debian caters to a differnt type of user than Ubuntu. Users that gravatate to Ubuntu tend to "want the easy path". While Debian attracts a user base that actively wants to learn about the OS (Linux usually but Debian offers more then just a "Linux" OS kernel and system (HURD or BSD flavored Debian anyone?)), it's advanced functions and configuration. Debian may not be "The Best" for "everyone" but it is for me and many others as well. Admittedly, I haven't used Ubuntu's "server version" but I will tell you, in my opinion and experiance, Debian is "second to none"on any equipment I administrate. I believe there are a good many others that will state nearly the same of their experiance with Debian GNU/Linux on their servers and other devices in their work enviorment.

I'm glad to hear something like that because I mostly have windows machines on desktops but choose from various linux distros for a server environment as I get away from shared hosting and start enjoying some privileges as root in a hosting environment with a VPS. I had to go with Debian because it is bundled with a web hosting control panel (DTC) that I wanted to use, and most of the documentation was for that environment, but things seem to work well.
This thread seems to refer more to desktop use than for server administration, but the more I use Debian as my OS for my VPS, the more I wonder why anyone would use Ubuntu for such a task.
And even being somewhat of a newb, this thread inherently has some conceptual errors to start with, but looks like there is some value to compare Ubuntu with Debian.

I am glad to hear that you are not trying to use Debian off of remote hosted hardware. Many of the ones I am often asked to help with are still running versions of Debian that are no longer supported. Generally, the poster wants to install the latest package of something and can't get it installed for various reasons. It is important to keep the OS it's self at least up to date enough that you can still get a package from backports.org or still be able to retreave the latest security fixes. Granted, I have seen servers still running Woody and Sarge and doing their jobs well after all these years, no mantinance required but usually at some point someone wants to add a new feature availible only from an up-to-date package. On systems that are no longer supported it is one heck of a lot of work to get a new gcc or libc installed without upgrading the system so you can compile the "new package" on the old system. Just a note here, I am talking about Debian systems that are 3 to 9 years old here.

Debian makes a release roughly every 18 months, this next one is talking a bit longer and I suspect Squeeze not to be "officially ready" until around December, give or take a month or so. KDE4 has been a bug nightmare. Also, there are some shiny new packages being shipped with this next release that have held things up a bit. All in all, I think it will have been "worth the wait".

I however have a few friends in the enterprise world that couldn't wait any longer and they are sucessfully running Squeeze on their critical network servers. Mind you, there is no X enviorment on their servers so the risk of any major bug is pretty well avoided. Myself, I don't need anything new or fancy yet so my servers are still using Lenny. I have been able to get anything I needed an update for through backports.org but even if I did need something exotic the system is still supported so backporting it myself would not be a real issue.

As a side note: I use Debian for both workstations and my servers. I do still have one "bonified" Windows system on my network though.