[rntksi]

I've ran a lot of systems for the past 15+ years and I can honestly say that for servers, Debian is the most solid I've been able to run. (Debian, not Ubuntu). Especially because of its release cycle and no-nonsense vision. I'm not sure which Debian release you've had experience with, but ever since Debian Stretch it's been very solid.

Another system (altogether different since it's not Linux) that comes close to Debian in terms of solidness is FreeBSD. However, the experience of doing `dist-upgrade` for Debian from a release to another is miles better than `freebsd-upgrade` and the shenanigans of upgrading all your ports tree. I have to do that once every 2-3 years, and it takes an hour for Debian, whereas it takes half a day for FreeBSD (for example I just had to do that recently for a 10.x to 12.2 database running on FreeBSD system)

I would definitely NOT recommend Ubuntu. If one looks at Ubuntu and think it's like Debian - it's not. It doesn't come close at all in terms of robustness. An unrelated example: once you have Ubuntu up, there's tons of service that I don't know serves what purpose that's already running. For Debian, that does not happen, you have a minimal set running.

Also, you can keep running Debian for years before having to touch anything. This is one of the behaviour I'm looking for when I consider systems for work (what I mean by "solid"/"robust").

So rolling release systems like Arch serves a totally different purpose.