Why I will stay with Ubuntu

[snowpine]

many packages are updated more conservatively than I've seen with a few other distros.

They are updated exactly every 6 months (barring a release delay, which has only happened once). Granted, this is more conservative than a "rolling release" distro (like Arch) but still rather aggressive compared to many popular distsros such as Debian, Red Hat, CentOS, etc.

[os2]

I was comparing to something like openSUSE which is also conservative but not as much as Ubuntu. Arch on the other hand is at the other extreme end of the scale.

[neruson]

I like Ubuntu for it's good proprietary hardware support. I use it with on my main desktop in my living room as a media center dual booting with Windows 7, but I've always been more comfortable with Fedora. I've been using "yum" with Red Hat/Fedora since around 2000. I wouldn't say one is better than the other (although the Fedora devs are much quicker in rolling out bug fixes than Ubuntu's devs imho). It's mainly a familiarity and comfort thing with me. I mean if you spend 12-13 years with a distro you're going to develop a rather strong attachment to it

Other than those two, I started out with Slackware in 1998 when I was in high school, but haven't used it since since I switched to Red Hat a few years later. I used Arch Linux for a couple years on a secondary laptop. To this day, it's the fastest distro (regardless of what DE or WM I was using) I ever used. I just don't have the time to deal with it anymore. Fedora is about as bleeding edge as I want to get.

[bashhimup]

That is pretty farfetched. Ubuntu is good, but it's not "the best operating system ever", as you said.