That's just flawed reasoning. Many distros can achieve very high reliability without sacrificing the new-er packages. Debian just operates on a deathly slow release cycle.
If my machines go down, I lose a tremendous amount of money as well. I used Redhat, on two servers, (poor hardware I might add) and both achieved 99.99% uptime (all factors included, like hardware failure -- had a NIC card fail -- DNS failure, upstream provider failure, etc). You're not going to get much better than that unless you load balance or include some kind of redundancy.
The fact is, one machine is one machine. If you don't know what you're doing, install Redhat, and check all the defaults, you might very well end up with software you don't need in your situation. That will be the same for any distribution. Aside from that, the small statistical difference in uptimes would be negligible. I haven't read or written any studies about this, so its conjecture, but many stability problems come from hardware and other miscellaneous causes like upstream providers... If you took 100 Redhat computers and 100 Debian computers in the same configuration on different hardware and networks, I'd say there'd be negligible correlation between one Distro and uptime.
Having said that, many other distributions are FAR ahead of Debian. For example, why not include an X11 interface, with a fall-back text-based interface? I don't worship GUIs, but its an advance that is there and has been there. As another poster diligently put it, this "brand new installer" looks exactly like Redhat's 5 years or so ago. And it's not just the installer GUI, the desktop looks *horrible*!
Why not just add a simple custom theme to it? Hell, use one of the ones already available. It'll get people excited for your product. You just can't deny the marketing factor. What's one of the pillars of marketing? Packaging. People tend to judge something based on how it looks. So make it look nice! You'll gain market share any way about it.
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That's just flawed reasoning. Many distros can achieve very high reliability without sacrificing the new-er packages. Debian just operates on a deathly slow release cycle.
If my machines go down, I lose a tremendous amount of money as well. I used Redhat, on two servers, (poor hardware I might add) and both achieved 99.99% uptime (all factors included, like hardware failure -- had a NIC card fail -- DNS failure, upstream provider failure, etc). You're not going to get much better than that unless you load balance or include some kind of redundancy.
The fact is, one machine is one machine. If you don't know what you're doing, install Redhat, and check all the defaults, you might very well end up with software you don't need in your situation. That will be the same for any distribution. Aside from that, the small statistical difference in uptimes would be negligible. I haven't read or written any studies about this, so its conjecture, but many stability problems come from hardware and other miscellaneous causes like upstream providers... If you took 100 Redhat computers and 100 Debian computers in the same configuration on different hardware and networks, I'd say there'd be negligible correlation between one Distro and uptime.
Having said that, many other distributions are FAR ahead of Debian. For example, why not include an X11 interface, with a fall-back text-based interface? I don't worship GUIs, but its an advance that is there and has been there. As another poster diligently put it, this "brand new installer" looks exactly like Redhat's 5 years or so ago. And it's not just the installer GUI, the desktop looks *horrible*!
Why not just add a simple custom theme to it? Hell, use one of the ones already available. It'll get people excited for your product. You just can't deny the marketing factor. What's one of the pillars of marketing? Packaging. People tend to judge something based on how it looks. So make it look nice! You'll gain market share any way about it.