To my mind, Redhat is hard work, Debian is solid, and Ubuntu is great if you need to support very new hardware. I was impressed by the way Ubuntu sorted out the wifi on a laptop, integrated the connection fine, graphics was cool, just mostly worked (audio was a bit of a pain).
For commercial stuff, Debian is my preference - when you want a solid, stable system that you can depend on, its perfect. Apt is very easy to use, and you can also control what patches it will use if required (so we grab new patches, try them on a DEV box, if they're ok deploy them on UAT - user acceptance testing - and if that passes then to live, means we know exactly which box has what revision, and can recreate it, and previous ones too). Downside of apt is its so easy to do - apt-get update; apt-get upgrade; apt-get dist-upgrade. You'll now be running the lastest and greatest release of stable/testing/unstable, but if you find something really important doesn't now work for you, there is no easy way back :-(
Other aspect is support - Debian support tends to be fairly hard core. If you've identified a bug, they'll help you explore it, work round it, and prob issue a fix. Go on with a numpty question and they'll tend to eat you alive. Ubuntu suffers the other way, the assumption is the problem is finger trouble, managing to find anyone who can actually help you fix a real problem is not easy when you're bombarded by "have you tried logging out and logging in again, worked for me" etc.
Hang on, I'm on holiday today, don't need to talk work - off for a ride :-)
Nige
