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It all comes down to preference, including what works for your hardware and your use case(s).

Before GNOME 3, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora all used GNOME 2, and they were more alike than different. I'd say the same is true today with these three and GNOME 3, though Ubuntu skins it somewhat differently.

They really are more alike than you'd think.

Testing environment does play a part. Different distros do sometimes use different paths for shared libraries and configs and such. They also sometimes have different versions of libraries in their repos. The programs may be written in a way that don't take this into account and may use an incompatible library or try and look for things in the wrong places.

Linux is just a shell [0], all the distos add their own GUI + specific mods.

I’m guessing Ubuntu is recommended because it’s most widely available or has the least amount of “under the hood” mods that make others more challenging.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux