Yes, you should try switching to a rolling release distro. Arch is great. I've been using it for the last five or six years now and have had no desire to switch

Yes, you should try switching to a rolling release distro. Arch is great. I've been using it for the last five or six years now and have had no desire to switch to a new main distro, though I try out the major ones periodically and install them for certain applications. Arch is definitely the best workstation for a developer. The convenience of binary packages, the flexibility of PKGBUILDs (analogous to Gentoo's ebuilds, but much more reasonable), vanilla packages and quick releases make it a dream workstation for a developer, despite a rare wonkiness here or there. It works much better than Ubuntu et al for a development box.