I suspect that Debian or Ubuntu would work well in any laboratory. In addition to easy installation and configurations, many people speak highly of the
NeuroDebian repository that can be useful for simple installations of different packages.
I've had AFNI (and Freesurfer, etc) running on Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS for quite some time. Hardware support is pretty decent across most distributions at this point. I think the advantage of Debian/Ubuntu is that you can upgrade between releases fairly seamlessly. In contrast, RedHat-based Distros have historically required more fiddling and a separate installer to upgrade. That said, I know plenty of laboratories still running CentOS 4 or CentOS 5 with updated versions of all neuroimaging software with no plans to upgrade.
