There’s nothing terribly wrong with using Ubuntu as a desktop – at the very least, it has good hardware support, and it’s now the leading desktop (AFAIK) so 3^rd parties (like Google) support it.

I recommend you stick to the LTS versions unless you like living on the bleeding edge.

However, there is generally no such thing as a GUI that runs on a desktop to let you manage a server.  Unlike Windows, your choice of desktop/server combination is largely irrelevant here.

If you pick Ubuntu Server or Debian, you’ll get a reasonably-stable, well-supported server that uses the same command-line tools as your desktop for management.

If you pick RHEL/CentOS for your server, you’ll get a reasonably-stable, well-supported server that uses 90% of the same command-line tools as your desktop for management.

If you want a GUI to manage a server, you’re largely limited to tools like Webmin (www.webmin.com) and its ilk, and at that point, you could as easily manage your server from an iPad as from an Ubuntu desktop.

-Adam

From: roundtable-bounces@muug.mb.ca [mailto:roundtable-bounces@muug.mb.ca] On Behalf Of Justin Richard
Sent: October 17, 2016 13:18
To: roundtable@muug.mb.ca
Subject: [RndTbl] Ubuntu desktop vs server.

Hi. I'm honing to sound like a total noob here but please have patience I'm trying like hell to catch up. Lol. 

I'm about to setup Rsync to transfer files to a backup machine. 

So I'm looking around the internet for people's best practices and opinions. I'm noticing that many of the admins are doing things in a combo of GUI in desktop and cmd line opposed to strictly cmd line in server. 

I'm from the Windows world and I think that having a point and click environment would help me move quicker. 

Can you guys tell me why I wouldn't want to use Ubuntu desktop? Or is there a better desktop to use for admin tasks? 

Thanks in advance. 

Justin.