I have to admit I was (and am) anti-ubuntu, because of stuff like this from Mark and Canonical, but for a while it was the only distro that just worked with no

I have to admit I was (and am) anti-ubuntu, because of stuff like this from Mark and Canonical, but for a while it was the only distro that just worked with no problems on my work macbook pro, so I succumbed for practicalities sake. Now that I am working on my own projects full-time, I have switched to fedora on my desktop. My main reasoning as a sysadmin for distro choice goes like this: For server, debian, centos, opensuse. For a business that has strict support requirements, debian can become ubuntu, centos can become rhel, and opensuse can become suse. For desktop, it's generally preferable to me to be running in the same ecosystem as the servers you are supporting in the majority. So if debian on servers, debian for desktop, but being sometimes less reliable on desktops, ubuntu makes a good replacement. If centos on servers, fedora on workstation. You get the idea. Of course you should pick what works best for you, the point being here to this longwinded comment is that, if you don't like ubuntu but like the ubuntu base system, I suggest you pain your way through debian instead, which is a much freer distro, but often doesn't hold your hand nearly as much either. Remember, Stallman was/is right.