What would you like to have?
- There's a huge amount of Ubuntu branding and renaming. I initially paid attention to this after the pretty silent updates that added "Ubuntu branding" to Firefox. I saw a lot of packages and applications that were renamed (or at least represented differently) to make them more generic. Personally, I would rather use the raw software and see the real names for the software packages. Fedora does this a bit too, but to a lesser extent.
- The interface is very polished, but I like having a very raw, stripped-down interface. I generally work quickly, and I can't stand it when the OS can't keep up. I like KDE, and this can be a memory hog, but Ubuntu's additions are even worse, IMO. It was getting harder and harder with each version of Ubuntu to get the interface where I wanted, and now that they're branching away from standard GNOME, I only see this getting worse.
- On that note, I was very unimpressed by Kubuntu, as it had obviously not received the same quality of attention as Ubuntu. As I prefer to use KDE and LXDE, I appreciate the very consistent quality between all the "spins" of Fedora.
- SELinux and hard-drive encryption work out of the box. Again, I'm sure I could get this running just fine on Ubuntu, but it's so much easier with Fedora, so this contributed to me just feeling more at home.
- The kernel had been modified a ton before it got shipped in a release. When I recompiled a kernel it wreaked havoc on some of the software that had previously relied on the added functionality. On Fedora I rebooted into a vanilla kernel and had no problems.
I realize some of these are pretty abstract reasons, but these seem to be directions they're heading more and more, so as I said, I just feel more at home on Fedora, now that I'm comfortable using Linux.
I think Ubuntu should have versions/spins like Fedora. I think it's confusing for the end user with their odd branding Kubuntu etc. How about Ubuntu - Education Edition, Ubuntu - Lightweight Edition, Ubuntu - Netbook Edition - something like that instead.
I'm curious - how do you like Debian?
I like to drive my computer with the keyboard. I tried to avoid Gnome on my last install, but it's keyboard config, theme manager and Nautilus won over other desktops. I use metacity, which is boring but good.
To be honest I'm not totally enamoured with any Linux distro. But I like the ones that try to remain free. Oh and the ones that work with my hardware.
My work's servers use Debian, and my home ISP runs an unmetered repository for it too.
I've tried Fedora in the past when I was still very much a newbie and found it intimidating. Given I know next to nothing about Red Hat derivatives of Linux it would probably pay to get familiar with them sometime over the next few months.