[Koha] Debian vs Ubuntu server for koha

Dave Sherohman dave at sherohman.org
Sat Jul 27 00:22:05 NZST 2019


On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 11:57:44AM +0000, King, Fred wrote:
> As far as Koha administration is concerned, what are the differences
> between Debian and Ubuntu? I know Ubuntu is said to be the easy
> version of Debian, but how does that translate into Koha?

There should be little or no difference.  The main difference between
Debian and Ubuntu administration is that Ubuntu tends to have better
support for desktop GUIs and related software.  Since koha isn't a
dektop GUI application, that difference doesn't really affect it.

The other major difference is that Ubuntu updates software with new
features much, much more frequently than Debian does.  This ties in to
Ubuntu being more desktop-focused, since desktop users tend to want the
"latest and greatest" of their applications.  For servers, though, I
prefer Debian precisely because it isn't constantly making unnecessary
changes to the installed software - for the most part, Debian updates
packages within the stable distribution only for security reasons, and
even then the security fixes are backported when possible, so as to
minimize the resulting changes.

So it really comes down to your preferences.  If you prefer GUI tools to
manage package installation and upgrades, you might want to go with
Ubuntu, otherwise Debian is marginally more stable - but Ubuntu is also
very solid, so you're unlikely to have problems either way.

-- 
Dave Sherohman


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