&quot;stable&quot;. &quot;new-enough&quot;<p>This is a leading word. As is a lot of that paragraph. For many tools some companies use, Debian certainly is NOT &quot;new-enough&quot; with many package choices. Nor is Ubuntu inherently NOT &quot;stable&quot; - and still trails a little behind the leading edge. As for upgrades, I&#x27;ve watched many a server upgrade seamlessly from 10.04 LTS to 12.04 to 14.04. I&#x27;m sure there can be and has been many a person, many a thread who&#x27;ve not had seamless experiences. But the same applies for Debian - heck, even the release manual has a section entitled &quot;How To Recover A Broken System&quot; with reference to system upgrades.<p>&quot;non-free firmware&#x2F;drivers&quot;<p>How often needed? In this article alone, IPMI, BMC, RAID, BIOS.<p>&quot;And of course, there&#x27;re the ethical &amp; engineering issues&quot;<p>This is a derailment. What exactly are the ethical issues for a closed source company in using other proprietary software?<p>I&#x27;m by no means an Ubuntu fanatic. It has its share of issues, absolutely. I have everything from FreeBSD to Debian to RHEL to OmniOS to administer, and they all have strengths and weaknesses.