You may want to consider how well each distro supports different profiling / tracing tools, especially in userspace. For example, I've recently started to play

You may want to consider how well each distro supports different profiling / tracing tools, especially in userspace. For example, I've recently started to play with Systemtap, and found it to be the perfect tool for some of my work. But after some frustrating attempts to use it on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, I discovered that it's broken and Canonical won't fix it. I tried to build my own, nonbroken version of Systemtap on this distro, but ran into nontrivial problems with library versions. Even on Ubuntu 16.04 / 16.10, Ubuntu seems to build Perf Tools (which is part of the kernel's code base) without support for Python scripting. It was pretty easy for me to fix, but it did require downloading the kernel source, and rebuilding "perf". I don't know if they have a good reason for doing things this way, but it's irritating. In contrast, Oracle Enterprise Linux has DTrace, which arguably is the (aging) gold standard for dynamic tracing on Linux. But OREL is a distro I never seriously considered using before needing this kind of tool. * NOTE: I'm not trying to state which tracing / profiling tools work well on specific distros. I haven't done enough research for that. My point was only to bring attention to this category of feature.