"""Does anybody have experience with Ubuntu Server?"""

Ubuntu is great. We decided to go for Ubuntu because at the time we made that decision, Debian was still at 3.1 and very outdated. They have played catchup since then and 4.0 is much more modern (i'm mostly talking about more recent versions of popular stuff like postfix, postgres, mysql, gcc, etc.).

We standardized on 6.06/LTS but I've been also been playing with the 8.04/LTS release that is coming up. Looks very nice and we will probably switch to it. For new installations. Old stuff still runs rock solid.

But I suppose the server-edition is not as 'bloated' as desktop? Personally I'm not much for using Ubuntu on the desktop, because the standard installation contains way too much bloat. Like a `bluetoothd` running standard. But if the server-edition comes pretty 'unbloated' out of the box, I might consider that for my next setup.

The default installation is pretty bare just like Debian. I've had no issues with it, and it does offer more up-to-date software compared to Debian (as well as Python 2.5 being the default unlike Debian, if you're using that).

I use it (in production), and the only real advantage to me are more current packages.

Another advantage is that, since the desktop version is pretty nice and easy to use, you can get all your developers using it on their desktops, so that they're running the same system as the servers. In the last company I worked for, we were set up like that - Ubuntu everywhere. It made things easier to keep track of, as well as cheaper because no one had windows, except for a few machines where it was indispensable for running various program.

the advantage is that you have the same software running on your server as you do on the desktop. i can't tell you how frustrated I've been in the past trying to deploy some code i wrote only to find out I need to upgrade half the libraries on the system for my code to work.

most people agree that it's good to develop on the platform you will run in production, but they take it the opposite way (run outdated server software on their development environment).

If you asked me what the restart command for debian is, I wouldnt be able to say. That's how stable it is.

Debian etch