Which distro makes the most sense for Ghost?

This is very much a subjective question, and any amount of Google’ing will tell you “go with whatever works for your use case”, but if you don’t know any particular distro, you won’t have any preference either way.

Specifically between the two distros you highlighted (Debian and Ubuntu), here are my thoughts.

• Debian is the upstream of Ubuntu, so they share a common base
• Ubuntu adds some additional functionality on top of Debian that can be useful

Debian:

• is a stalwart of the Linux world and has been around a long time
• it is stable but has fewer major releases, so doesn’t change too much too often
• one reason it is stable is the standard packages are older versions (but are patched with the latest security fixes)
• stays true to its open-source roots (i.e. no commercial offering, no software encumbered with patents, no advertising etc.)
• I don’t believe they have a set release schedule, although all releases are potentially supported for up to 5 years

Ubuntu:

• is the commercial product behind the Canonical company, but is open-source too. It is built from Debian
• has extra niceties on top of Debian - such as PPAs to allow running more up-to-date, or non-standard packages from other sources, and Live Patching (live kernel patches that don’t need a reboot)
• releases on a set schedule with a fast (every 6 months) and slower (every 2 years) cadence
• newer releases have more up-to-date packages than Debian
• LTS releases (every 2 years) are designed to be stable and supported for up to 5 years (non-LTS releases release every 6 months but are only supported for 9 months)

I have used both and personally prefer Ubuntu. It has a reputation as being newbie-friendly, but even as an experienced Linux user who loves working in the command-line, I find some of the “niceties” useful, such as the Ubuntu Firewall (ufw.)

If you do go with Ubuntu, I’d suggest the latest LTS release (20.04, released in April last year). The instructions in the guide shouldn’t differ greatly from 18.04 to 20.04.

@andysh,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I appreciate your time and expertise. :)

@sdimbert --

I used to use Ubuntu and dumped it for Debian. @andysh has presented a pretty fair assessment…

IMHO, Canonical clutters up Ubuntu with useless doodads and makes it hard to get rid of them…mostly in the furtherance of Canonical's endless promotion of it's products and services (I defy you to figure out the Ubuntu "message of the day" scheme! It's horribly obtuse and designed with one purpose -- to relentlessly push Canonical advertising to command-line users -- and to be un-deletable).

Canonical has engaged in spyware…they still might…they won't deny it absolutely & categorically. Canonical's marketing barely acknowledges that Ubuntu is even "Linux". The guy behind Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, is a rich, buzzword-spouting showboat who wouldn't know a byte from a bicycle (but he's God's gift to computing…just ask him). His thumbprint is all over Ubuntu. He's responsible for Ubuntu release naming -- Dippy Dragonfly, etc.

Debian is none of that. It's run by a mostly anonymous core team who are all elected by the developer community with an honorary leader that is elected by the core team and all serve for fixed terms. They let the Debian distro quality & capability speak for them. Debian can be a little hard to deal with -- especially with version upgrades -- but it just works. There's no drama; no changing gears about supported features (at the last minute…or flip-flopping about something over the course of several releases); no headlines. Debian moves from point A to point B more or less in a straight line with well-defined and published in advance objectives.

Having made my bones in the Bell Labs research edition Unix and Berkeley Software Distribution days (I still vastly prefer BSD to any flavor of Linux…and I use NetBSD at home), I prefer Debian's quiet focus on engineering excellence over Ubuntu's relentless pursuit of good PR & market share. Debian is a draught horse; Ubuntu is a show horse.

As they used to say in the Usenet newsgroup days…flames to /dev/null.

-- sw

(I defy you to figure out the Ubuntu "message of the day" scheme! It's horribly obtuse and designed with one purpose -- to relentlessly push Canonical advertising to command-line users -- and to be un-deletable).

This one’s easy (when you know how, of course!) … /etc/default/motd-news

Set ENABLED in there to 0 and voila. You can even change the URL there to somewhere other than Canonical and push your own news!

Once disabled there is also a systemd timer called “motd-news” which is responsible for fetching the content, so you can disable that too.