Here's a distro that finally takes what's best about Debian:ease of use and installation. What's more, Ubuntu has built a considerable development community that should give it staying power. Although this is not a long-term support (LTS) release, updates are available for 18 months from release, with the next LTS planned for 2008.

Building on its desktop platform, Canonical Ltd. offers a server distro with the security enhancement of AppArmor and improved compatibility with Samba and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP, authentication. Ubuntu Server Edition is available and optimized for x86, AMD64, EM64T (Intel Core and Xeon), and Sun Sparc architectures and is free to the public, with support packages starting at $2,750 for a year of 24/7 assistance.