A lot of friends have these problems at University. Turns out the common factor is Ubuntu. After I tell them to install Debian and enable non-free sources, they never have weird bugs again.
I sometimes get this feeling that Ubuntu is giving Linux a bad name, with all the weird stuff that happens (or unexpectedly fails to happen) when running it. Of course, I only have anecdotal evidence here...
I've switched to Arch about a year ago and sure, the installation was a bit painful, but after that, I don't know... it just works (including the switch to the new 4.x kernel, but I'm given to understand that the jump was fairly minor). Oh, and Plasma 5 is pretty :)
I had Debian for a while, but the outdated packages were killing me (and I was on testing). Other than that, I couldn't really complain.
Have you considered trying out CentOS on those ops servers? There's plenty of support and documentation online. Package versions do tend to lag a bit, but I believe Python 3 is available (EDIT: It is... http://sopel.chat/python3-centos7.html ).
Interesting, I'm also servicing an ailing CentOS 5 server; un-upgradeable and a pain: currently having to migrate the core application onto a new server, haven't had issues with Ubuntu LTS for server usage in the past so that's what I'm going for but the discussion here makes me want to go with Debian instead next time!
Thanks for the advice on Debian, I figured Ubuntu would be similar in stability to Debian Testing, as Ubuntu uses the same code base for its main repos AFAIR, perhaps I was wrong. Which release branch do you recommend to your friends? Debian Stable?
To be fair to Ubuntu, I've had issues with distros other than Ubuntu, though admittedly I've not used Debian much.
