You're probably right there. I can't remember the last time I did updates from a GUI in Fedora.
On the other hand, I've had Ubuntu cause major issues on my netbook when they decided to change from python 2.6 to 2.7 mid stable release, and later when the device stopped booting entirely for no apparent reason. I've had ubuntu suddenly just die on me several times on desktops, but never as strangely as on the netbook.
I can't remember the last time I had to do any driver tweaking in Fedora. Flash is still a cunt in chrome.
Moving between major releases of Ubuntu (8.10 to 9.04 and 9.10 to 10.04, specifically) has caused issues for me in the past, but excluding this, I have no idea WTF you could be referring to.
Re: Python 2.7 getting installed by default "mid-stable release" -- 'apt-get install python' in Ubuntu 10.04 still installs python2.6 for me, and moreover, I have python2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and 3.0 all on the same machine without conflicts.
On the topic of choosing a distribution to use --
Before 9.04, I could understand why a power user might prefer Fedora or Debian or CentOS, either because of their familiarities or because of how these distributions are setup by default, but, in my own opinion, since 9.04 Ubuntu has displayed remarkable stability and continues to maintain an incredible pace of updates. If you're an end-user (desktop/laptop use), 9.04 marked the first release where I felt the OS was "more stable" and "more ready" for consumer adoption than paid alternatives (OSX and Win7), and because Canonical puts out a new version every 6 months (with consistent quality and always delivering great new updates) I consider Ubuntu to be the best candidate for any task. Moreover, in my opinion, adoption rates should be a primary factor in making decisions about open source software, and Ubuntu's the clear winner here; Every cloud provider available in the libcloud python package for remote server management supports 10.10, which has been out less than 2 months, and this speaks volumes about it's uptake.
For anyone hosting their own servers --
I fucking love running the same OS on my laptop as I do on my servers; on a good day, I'll launch and configure 10 new servers*, and having a unified workflow and a single package manager to maintain familiarity with has proven crucial to my ability to get shit done.
*(my development process includes writing scripts to create a new server from scratch, so I launch a new cluster of servers every time I have a new fix to test. It's not unusual for me to do this 3-4 times a day with 2-3 machines per cluster)
