"Which distribution should I use" has, over the years, inspired more lively debates and shattered more friendships and created more enemies than "Which Christian denomination should I join?". Thus, it has surpassed religion and politics to become the #1 Topic To Avoid In Polite Company.
Why, you ask?
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
So, you should be thankful that the list of distributions has been heavily curated.
... but that's not useful information.
http://www.linode.com/about/ has some statistics about what others have chosen; also, take a look at
http://library.linode.com/ to see what documentation is available for the various distributions. Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS are probably the big three.
Ubuntu and Debian use the same packaging system, and indeed, Ubuntu can be viewed as a branch of Debian -- the two distributions, especially in the server space, are quite similar. However, Ubuntu has a rather unique release schedule: normal releases occur every 6 months and are supported with updates for 18 months, but every 2 years, a Long-Term Support (LTS) release occurs with 5 years of support (for servers). These tend to come out on April of even years. Ubuntu's version numbers are date-coded, e.g. 11.10 = October 2011, and the release names (oneiric) are adjectives assigned alphabetically and applied alliteratively to animals (Oneiric Ocelot).
Debian's release cycle, on the other hand, has been more of a "when it's ready" thing but it is moving towards a two-year cycle for major releases as well. Releases tend to be coming out in the spring of odd-numbered years and are supported for a year after the next major version's release: Debian 6.0 was tagged 'stable' in February of this year, which made Debian 5.0 'oldstable', and it will be supported until February of next year. Release numbers (e.g. 6.0) are in the usual major.minor form, and release names (squeeze) are derived from Toy Story. There is also a 'testing' tag which is analogous to a rolling release system.
Both Ubuntu and Debian package a wide variety of software and tend to enjoy good stability. Also, upgrades between releases tend to work pretty well.
CentOS is less of an independent distribution and more of a mirror of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a commercial OS with its own release schedule. It's based on the RPM package management system. As you can guess, its release schedule is based on the RHEL release schedule plus a variable time delay (85 days for 5.6, 242 days for 6.0, 54 days for 5.7, etc). Currently, three major releases are supported: 4.x for maintenance updates until February 2012, and 5.x and 6.x with full releases until Q4 2011 and Q4 2014, and maintenance updates until 2014 and 2017, respectively. Despite being based on RHEL, they do maintain their own QA and security teams.
Upgrading from CentOS 5.x to 6.x is not possible without reinstalling. Also, because it is based on a commercially-supported OS, the available software tends to be heavily curated and tested by RHEL, meaning there's less of it and it tends to be older. The lag between RHEL and CentOS, and the CentOS security update process, tend to be rather worrying to me. But, if you need RHEL (e.g. for cPanel or FreePBX) but can't afford RHEL (... it's not cheap), it's a good option.
In all of these distributions, the version number of installed software will be the version that was current at release: security updates are backported and applied to it by the distribution's maintainers. This can throw off stupid security audits, but it's normal. This is part of the tradeoff that comes from having releases. (It's a good idea to subscribe to your distro's security announcement mailing list.)
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