[ale] Server distro help

[Joshua Kite]

Hi all - it's time I asked for some help.  I'm ready for a new server
distro.

As background, my introduction to Linux was Mandrake.  I used to joke with
my friends that we needed to start a usergroup for those who refused to
compile anything, and Mandrake mostly avoided that.  After playing with
Knoppix as a desktop for a while I was introduced to Ubuntu and stuck with
it until around the time Unity was introduced and performance on my
particular configuration became unacceptable.  I now use Mint for my
desktop and love it.

I have continued to use Ubuntu server with good results until today when I
upgraded to 11.10 and had yet another upgrade-introduced issue.

My needs are relatively simple.  I run the following:
-SAMBA and NFS
-MPD (Music Player Daemon)
-Linux Virtualization (virsh)
-Completely headless - no X installed or required at any point

All of my remaining functionality is running on virtual machines, and I'd
like to leave those as-is for now, although I might move them in the
future.  These include relatively simple tools like Apache and Dansguardian.

One of the things I like about about a distribution like Ubuntu is that, in
theory, I can run apt-get upgrade and update all of the packages on the
system.  And, in theory, these have been tested to work together.  I always
expect a minor issue with an upgrade but not something that prevents the
system from successfully booting.  What I did not like about Mandrake years
ago was the challenge of dependency hell that seemed to come with RPM-based
systems of the day.  However, at this point I'm open to about anything.

My knowledge there are probably four basic choices:
-Gentoo (fun, resolves the upgrade issue, but probably overkill)
-Fedora/Red Hat based
-SuSe based
-Debian based

I've never worked with any of the "upstream" solutions.  Is it time for
this technically middle-of-the-road geek to take one of them on?  If so,
what is the overwhelming recommendation?

Thanks,

Josh Kite
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