Ubuntu tries a lot of different things, and the environment swings around wildly. Sometimes you'll see a howto that has different steps for each of the past four or five releases (6mo apart). Debian is much more considered in it's changes, and is better suited for server environments. The Debian philosophy is quite clear, and you never have to keep an eye out for encroaching adware or phone-home stuff in the core systems. Debian also does less 'magic stuff' for you; for example, if you mistype a command, Debian will just 'not found' it, whereas Ubuntu will suggest-sell you a command... which takes time for the results to be parsed and presented.

On the desktop, Debian has quite a few more rough edges, and you wouldn't really recommend it for a newbie.

Regarding redhat being out of fashion, part of that is that Ubuntu was a big drawcard to bring devs to linux because they focused on polishing the desktop, so the debian family got an influx of users. Personally, I don't like redhat tooling as I find them full of gotchas and their output is usually full of chaff and hard to parse. That may be just a personal taste issue; I'm sure plenty of redhat admins find debian tooling weird and odd.

Debian is fairly stable, has been around for ages but is still active, is completely free and community-driven, and most people are familiar with the package management and config file structure on Debian (or Debian derivatives).

On top of that, it was already a pretty popular distribution. The more people use it, the more documentation becomes available, and the more new people will pick it up.

> Also why it looks like RHEL family is completely out of fashion? Is it considered too "enterprisy"?

Well, look at the website: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enter.... That won't appeal to anyone outside of an enterprise chair.

My read of it (as someone in the Debian/Ubuntu world) is that the CentOS split meant new sysadmins and users tended more towards Ubuntu.

RHEL/CentOS is still around, but you don't hear about it too often.

Why Ubuntu? If you're not writing GUIs, Ubuntu is just a less-stable Debian.

> Why Ubuntu?

PPAs.

PPA's are a seriously killer feature. Easily one of the most important parts of the Ubuntu ecosystem. Not enough people realize it.

What is the killer part of PPAs? It is pretty easy to setup your own repo on a server using reprepro or aptly. Is it the build-machines-as-a-service aspect? Or the ease of adding a PPA to your system? Or the fact anyone can dump some stuff into a repo and have Launchpad/Canonical/Ubuntu bless them?

I think it's the part of having bleeding edge packages easily linked into your system. Other options might be available but people simply don't know about it. And developers themselves might already provide the PPAs which means there are many PPAs available.

Might be the worst solution but is the most well known.

All of it together, while providing a relatively straight forward interface for the consumers of the package.

> It is pretty easy to setup your own repo on a server using reprepro or aptly

Sure, it'd easy to set it up yourself. But the point is that PPAs are managed by someone else and have already been set up.

If I want a new software, and there's a PPA, I can just use that PPA and be able to use it straight away.