When recently looking at which Linux distribution to use for Drupal hosting I have found a couple of problems.
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I was setting up a test site on my personal server and noticed that my preferred Linux version Gentoo does not have good support for PHP's uploadprogress library. Uploadprogress is used to indicate to site users that files that they are uploading are in fact uploading. There is nothing worse than trying to upload a file, then finally giving up after a couple of minutes because you have no indication that anything is actually happening. this is especially useful when building a site that expects uploads os large, high quality images or videos.
After trying for two days to install uploadprogress on three different server I finally gave up and decided to try other versions of Linux.
First I tried Ubuntu. Ubuntu installed fine and drupal along with it. Unfortunately not everything worked as expected. My usual test site is a photo gallery. My normal photo gallery uses imagecache and imagecache_actions to scale and rotate images for the gallery. Image manipulation depends on the GD library, unfortunately not all the features that imagecache and imagecache_actions is i the GD library, PHP has the possibility of a built-in GD library but Ubuntu decided that PHP's GD library is a security risk and it isn't included in Ubuntu. Fortunately PHP 5.3 will fix this problem, but it isn't here yet.
I tried CentOS which doesn't have any problems with PHP GD, but it only includes PHP 5.1 which doesn't support uploadprogress.
The test systems I was setting up are virtial machines in Parallels Desktop for Mac OS X. I noticed during these test that Parallels doesn't have the best support for server operating systems. In the past I have used Virtual Box and VM Ware on linux without problems. When I was doing my test of Ubuntu I tried compiling PHP on my own to have the built in GD Library, the instructions seemed fairly easy, but in the compile process my virtual machine kept locking up. I have problems installing openSUSE, and when I decided to throw FreeBSD in the mix it didn't install properly as well.
For now I am going to be using Ubuntu because out of the box it has more support for what I need, it supports uploadprogress once it is installed, and ir should have support for the builtin PHP GD library come the release this April, until then I can live without it.
