Debian VS Ubuntu on Servers

Is there something objectively better on Ubuntu that makes it better for servers?

If no, then why does the server edition of Ubuntu even exist?

Edit: Please keep paid support out of the comparison.

I'm no expert in this area but I am going to guess that a lot of it comes down to support.

Looking at Debian's supprt page; it only shows a list of consultants, some of whom contribute back to Debian.

Please note that some consultants donate a portion of their income (derived from Debian) to supporting Debian. This is up to each consultant or company. Of course, this is pointed out to you so that it will hopefully influence your choice

Cannonical with Ubuntu offer paid support directly.

Ubuntu offers the best economics of any commercially supported Linux solution and the best community support. Canonical offers everything you need from fully managed clouds to training and support. We aim to be as easy and economical as possible to work with and that includes flexible pricing.

Let's take paid support out of the equation and look at the OS as is.

In that case I 'd say most differences come down to the package repositories. Debian has a Stable and Unstable repos and Ubuntu merges packages from both of them while also adding their own packages into their own repos. Ubuntu has proprietary driver support as well. So I'd say the differences only become apparent when you have certain requirements in an enterprise setting.

Other than than I'm not sure of any fundamental differences between the two.

Debian also has proprietary driver support if you add "non-free" to sources.list file. But thanks anyway.

I use both Debian and Ubuntu on production web servers.

Ubuntu is great if you need to get something running in 15 minutes and don't want to be too hands on.
Debian is wicked fast, but requires a bit more interaction to get running smooth.

Ubuntu does have paid support, which is a plus over Debian, but its just personal preference.

You asked why the server edition of Ubuntu exists... Paid support is exactly that reason. Canonical provides a bunch of enterprise stuff.

Is there another underlaying question to this?

@Eden @judahnator

I always see people saying that Debian needs more interaction. I know this is somewhat true for desktop but the only difference I've seen on headless systems is that Ubuntu comes with sudo installed by default.

I've seen Ubuntu use considerably more ram on a fresh install than Debian (100+ MB). This should automatically make it inferior to Debian but yet, it's still popular on servers for some odd reason.

Why would 100MB make it inferior for servers?

100MB wouldn't even calculate into my decisions unless it was an embedded low cost system.

Ubuntu potentially has some benefits with things like apparmor likely having profiles, where as debian your on your own completely with apparmor or selinux.

There's some peace of mind to be had when you know you can get support from the people that make the distro. RH is well known for this for example.

With Ubuntu you get more than just the distro out the gate in theory. Just like id use RHEL over CentOS where required even though they are basically identical.

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