Wow, I am impressed. OnSwipe on ExtremeTech makes my new iPad 3 lag, jerky display, broken back button, and impossible to read the article, just like iPad 1. I haven't seen it crash safari on the we iPad yet, but I also avoid browsing any OnSwiped pages.

For me, Ubuntu on a VPS is always a viable alternative to the PaaS offerings. Canonical's distribution makes it easy to get up and running quickly.

What is Canonical bringing on the VPS that is so specific? I haven't yet seen anything really interesting coming from Canonical.

They have a debian base with more recent packages but they also break more often (although quality has improved on Ubuntu in the last couple of years). Sure these are good systems.

My experience on Ubuntu has been roughly equivalent to my experience on ArchLinux.

What Canonical brings is more clicka as we call them. GUIs certainly are appealing for a certain category of users that also happen to be casual system administrators.

Also, I suppose you are slightly missing the goodness of PaaS. The only interesting thing in PaaS is instant deployment (as in single-step). A VPS with a custom image and a couple of scripts hardly ever gets as easy as PaaS unless you are small and thus have very few different configurations (which is a good thing).

>>What is Canonical bringing on the VPS that is so specific?

Little things, like UFW for easy firewall setup. But you're right Debian is often doing the heavy lifting.

Would like to see more details on this, is this openstack?

This is on actual hardware. I suppose this is a GUI on top of their Charms.