I would say the 'Linux' you use is all up to what you use it for.
In my many years of using Linux Distributions of all kinds, with the exception perhaps of Slackware. I use Debian on servers. Why not Ubuntu? Well because Debian actually gives two craps about making sure that you can upgrade from one release to the next smoothly. I had gone from the Sarge release all the way up to Squeeze, that's the same install from late 2005 up until about 2 months ago when I had given up on trying to fix an issue with some php scripts that didn't like being updated to 5.3 (not Debian's fault at all I was using an old PHP setup for my webmail.)
Ubuntu on the other hand has killed grub on many occasions, not even going from release to release, but just by installing updates. One programmer had his system made unbootable because of the fake raid controller setup was messed up during an update. I managed to get all his data off of his computer, and we ended up putting Windows 7 back on his desktop (not because of Linux sucking, but because he actually needed Windows 7 for testing what he was working on at that time).
For my desktops, I tend to like the latest software (most people don't understand Gnome-Shell 'cause it's new and different, personally I'm loving it and the direction they're going, though I agree that they need to step up on the customization.) I use Arch Linux on my desktops. It works, isn't always the most stable though. There was a nasty regression in ghostscript I ran into that took them awhile to fix, where it would print everything black except the black parts! But it was easy to tell it to hold the package to the one that worked, and I simply did that until they fixed it.
Every time I've tried Linux Mint, something is broken in it, and I end up switching to something else. Either that, or I don't like that they take default Gnome and change things (another reason I really started to dislike Ubuntu). I've been using Gnome since it was .22 in a really old version of Debian, and loved the original idea of Ubuntu (to release a new version every 6 months, based on the current Debian Testing packages, and make sure Gnome was the newest version. That really was their original intention. Then with the whole "oh, we ARE Linux now!" attitude they have, I've just moved away from them.)
Sorry for the rant, but figured I'd give some input, since I've had many years messing with the beast that is Linux. Ever since Red Hat 4.2! Yes, I'm talking before they split it up between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Those were the days when you had to compile almost everything by yourself. I remember sitting at a terminal for days downloading the packages (back when I had 56k modem, doing a Debian Net install.)
slaapliedje
