Let us not start WW3. I have a simple question. I have been using RH & CentOS distro. Recently, someone suggested that I should use Ubuntu. I am planning to setup several servers with email, DNS, Apache, PostgreSQL, etc. You name it and I will have it.

My question is why to use Ubuntu? Why is so great? Is there a LAMP using Ubuntu?

The really great thing about Ubuntu is it's Debian base. The package management is awesome!
I've set some Debian servers and it's really nice because they usually have sensible defaults. Also, you can do a LAMP install using the server cd without having to do any extra steps.
You can try Ubuntu or Debian (stable - will be Etch by December) inside a VM to get the "hang". Once you get used to it, going back to rpm... no way.

I rate Ubuntu very highly. Debian package management is the best. I changed to Ubuntu when SuSE 10.1 came out seriously borked in the package management area. I had been a long time SuSE user. SuSE has one edge I've seen and thats running 32 bit aps on a 64 bit kernel. Ubuntu requires more Linux expertise to do that. In my case I decided to run a 32 bit kernel on my AMD. The performance is great and more things I want like Flash are installed without event. My first Linux was Linspire but they've made so many changes to core packages that installing anything not in their CNR repository creates major problems with an extreme case of dependency hell. I freely recommend Ubuntu to new Linux users and its the only distro I will recommend.

I used Mandrake (2 years), Fedora Core (a month), Gentoo (6 months), and Ubuntu up until today on my main computer. Slackware, DamnSmallLinux, Knoppix, Slax here and there on some test machines. I've used linux since I signed up for this forum.

Ubuntu is really easy to use. Little to no hacking required.

I've used several distros over the years, including Xandros, Centos, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, Suse, Fedora Core 5, and Gentoo. I've used others, but those are the ones that made it more than a week or so. I'd say a majority of that time, was spent with Xandros and FC5. I install Ubuntu 6.06 about 2mo ago, and absolutely love it.

Actually, as of tonight, I formatted my Windows drive and no longer dual boot, its a Linux only system now. I only have Ubuntu on my primary drive at this moment, but when FC6 comes out, I plan to load it up on my secondary drive.

IGF

A very nice well-rounded system. Debian for desktop. Stable, not all that fast, not all that slow (comparison to gentoo, of course).

A little hard on the memory usage (my gentoo server only uses 28MB of 512MB RAM. Kubuntu ate all the RAM and 50MB of the swap!) Given that the Gentoo server didn't run X11, however, Kubuntu w/0 X11 running was still 128MB or so in the RAM - waaay too much for a memory-nazi like me.

Rating on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the best): 7.45

Strange, I've never found Ubuntu, or Fedora Core 5 for that mattre, to be real slow. Mandriva and Linspire are probably the slowest versions of Linux I've tried.

I personally would give it at least a 9.

IGF

Mandrake was my first distro (9.1)
At that moment in time, I was just happy to get away from formatting my computer because of viruses every second day. I didn't care how long it would take to load. So I didn't "cat /proc/uptime" at bootup to figure out how much it took to load the system with KDE.

Gentoo loaded in 50 seconds. 30 for the system, the rest for KDE.

Ubuntu loads in 45 seconds. System and gnome all loaded.
I believe the boot somewhat became faster with 6.06 compared to 5.10.

In respect to Gentoo, I find that Ubuntu's speed (and ease of use) is excelent.

Now, for really fast booting, kexec could save a few seconds.

*edit* all timings taken on the same computer */edit*

Tried it on my X40? The bottleneck was the hard drive.

Intel Pentium M 1.0GHz Ultra-Low Voltage
256MB RAM (recently upgraded to 256+512)
20GB 4500RPM IBM Micro-drive
Intel i855GM Graphics (really just a CPU->VGA bridge for all the performance it has : /

The architecture-generic binaries were much larger than the ones Gentoo makes. They flooded the RAM and into the swap space, which was REALLY SLOW because of the overall suckish nature of my hard drive. On a normal hard drive (7200RPM) it works just fine. But Gentoo works on my laptop like Kubuntu does on my Athlon64.

I'm glad you find it so nice. Next to Gentoo it really (cough) sucks. However, I have to note that Gentoo is catering to a whole different crowd. You can't really compare the two unless you're interested in a emotional flame-war (with the absence of a objective, logical comparison, which is impossible due to the nature of the distros.)

Bottom line: I like Gentoo best, you like Ubuntu. So long as I don't see apt-get in my portage tree, we can get along perfectly.

I use Kubuntu on my laptop, and it's the first distro that ever allowed me to have easy wireless connection,... So Kubuntu/ubuntu gets the big thumbs-up from me. I was previously an RPM based distro user, and for the future, will probably switch over to apt-get functionality full-time, even if it means apt4rpm on SuSE on my desktop... or, heck, even switch to Kubuntu there too...

I've used the following distros over the last five years... Mandrake, SuSE, Fedora, Mandriva (the re-named Mandrake), Debian, and now finally Kubuntu. If only Kubuntu was around five years ago (in any meaningful way).

I also have Kubuntu on my laptop. I've been a Slack-er for quite some time, but wanting to try out Debian for a change. Mainly because of everyone talking highly about its package management. Well, I'm impressed and I'm sticking with Kubuntu as my main laptop/desktop distribution from now on. I'm a gamer but the time is getting near when I will no longer play any games at all. That's when I will fully switch to Linux on my main home desktop and I've already chosen the distribution: Kubuntu.

On a scale of 1 to 10 for usability, I give it an 11.

You know what? Why wait? I'm going to root out XP from my main desktop at home. Goodbye MS-patch-Tuesdays-he11!

I tried Kubuntu around version 5.

It installed in 45 minutes, and when I tried it, Konqueror crashed. It would crash every second time or so. Wasn't impressed.

I would try Kubuntu again, but I do hope that it's stabler than last time.
...and loads faster than that...

Trust me, it's waaaaay more stable that what you describe.

If it's not, then there's obviously something wrong with how your hardware rubs the OS. 'Cause I've gotten Kubuntu working really smoothly on my slow little laptop. Wasn't fast or flashy, but it was stable. Gentoo is fast and stable, so that's why I stick with it. Otherwise, there's no real reason to stick with Gentoo other than portage (which is better than apt [for power-users, developers, testers, and other control-freaks], but harder to work with and much slower, but it does afford a faster end-product.)

That's good, I just might download it and give it a spin then.

My computer/applications crash when I do stuff that is too graphically intense.

Cool!

Gentoo was nice for the time I used it. At some point, I realized that compilling all the time just wasn't worth it, and that my system's health was suffering because of this in the long run.

Yah, I've gotten my Gentoo system pretty beat up, however, it's always come back stronger than ever after some simple updates I was too stupid to have caught in the first place.