I find the RHEL tooling to be more baroque and arcane than the Debian tooling, and the latter is generally nicer to read output from. Debian isn&#x27;t primarily targeting UI-based use cases, and Ubuntu inherits its system tooling from them. The arguments of &#x27;it starts automatically&#x27; are a RHEL vs Debian debate, not Ubuntu specifically, and I think they&#x27;re a canard, to be honest. If you&#x27;re installing a system where a brief window of localhost-only mysql server could be compromised, you&#x27;re already in an usual position - you&#x27;re installing a database system on a sever that other, untrusted entities are already using. If you&#x27;re concerned, you could simply install your pre-seed config file before installing mysql instead of after it, as Debian doesn&#x27;t overwrite altered config files.<p>Re: apache: at least apache on deb-based systems keeps the same name everywhere, and you don&#x27;t have to remember which part of the system calls it httpd and which part calls it apache :)