"I am a bit tired of how much Ubuntu gets promoted compared to other Linux based solutions."
I find Ubuntu, (at least the LTS releases), to be the best supported distro for major third party applications and the easist for novices to use. I'm using it as development platform and as a VMware host for my Windows OS images. It has supports my Dell hardware better than Dell's Windows drivers. In time, I'll probably migrate to a different distro, but I don't have the cycles to spend on tweaking Linux, I just want a distro that works with what I need now.