Might I recommend Kubuntu? It's got the same software repositories but KDE goodness. There's no ad-serving packages installed by default.

Thanks for the suggestion. Who produces that distro? I'm not sure how to formulate this question, but... I don't feel like I can trust canonical any more. So if they create kubuntu, why should I believe they didn't put something nefarious under the covers?

As an aside, I just reviewed the look of linux desktop environments on wikipedia, and tend to like GNOME the best, perhaps followed by cinnamon, Xfce, LXDE (I think). KDE doesn't look too bad. Though I can't experience the behavior or fundamental apps without running them.

PS: I just thought of another sickening thought. If some of the other distributions made by full-bore wonderful folks incorporate lots of packages from ubuntu, how do they know they aren't accidentally spreading canonical diseases?

Hello,
My first response was try OpenSuse. You can see by my sig that I run Studio Ubuntu (KDE), OpenSuse and Slackware and while Studio Ubuntu v.13.04 surprised me with how much better it had gotten, I don't use it much. I'm much happier on Suse and happier still on Slackware. Since you are concerned with the learning curve of administration, I doubt Slackware is for you even though it is one of the top distros for compiling from source. You should find OpenSuse a nice middle choice, enough like Ubuntu to make you comfortable (and not lose "too much ground") but enough different to be substantially better, especially where it seems you want more control over what gets installed.

As for your last question, beyond wondering what specifically you saw that is so threatening and apparently non-removeable, there should be no worries about other distros. There is no need, and in most cases it's a bad idea, to try to install software from Ubuntu on anything but Ubuntu. Most popular distros have their own repositories, and a few still cater to building from source so that is totally under the operators control as to what gets installed and where.

Also you can try the Live environment on most distros to see if you like the basics before you ever commit to installing. BTW will these changes affect Mint as well?

It depends how stable you want your OS to be. For up to date drivers and the like Debian Unstable or Debian Testing should be fine but there are times when an update will break packages. If you're careful though and only accept updates when they're proven you should be fine.
If you aren't too frightened by Canonical then Linux Mint is decent and reasonably up to date. There's a rolling release based upon Debian also which may be a little more likely to break on updates but has the advantage of not needing to update the distribution and canonical haven't touched it.
If you're willing to try other package management systems and ways of doing things then Fedora seem to be popular with developers. Of you could go to Slackware and choose the testing version to have the latest packages.

@273 I'm curious as to why you would recommend Fedora at this time? It is my understanding that Fedora has become the testbed for ever more systemd, like bleeding edge, and is commonly broken. Is this not so? It would seem to me that someone like OP requires a solid framework to write code. Bleeding edge and rolling releases are more administrative intensive than I gathered he is interested in now, or learning for the future. I would think Debian Stable or Suse is more suited to OP.

I mentioned it precisely because it is a test bed and some people want to "get in before everyone else". I would hope maxreason knows enough to google about a bit and decide upon stability over bleeding-edge.
If one runs, say, Debian Stable then to have anything like up-to-date NVIDIA drivers (for example) means adding extra repositories and apt-pinning or using the binary installer. Also with Debian Stable your libraries are going to be out of date and the situation will only get worse as time goes on.
It depends for whom you are developing, of course, but a nice solid, reliable system may be useless if you can't easily use more modern versions of libraries and drivers.

At least Debian would be very familiar to you since Ubuntu is based on it.

There's stable, testing and unstable. You can use stable with backports to selectively upgrade programs to newer versions than the ones in the stable repository. And if it's too old for you then just dist-upgrade to testing (which will be the next stable release).

I don't know. Maybe this will help or not.

http://tuxradar.com/content/distro-picker-0

Mint MATE edition. I'm surprised it wasn't the first one suggested.

Arch. Sure there is a learning curve but it's a great and popular linux distro. Also, pclinuxos is a good alternative to ubuntu.

I don't know whether some people think it is a popularity contest when someone asks "What distro should I use/try?" and feel compelled to chime in with their fave but it is useless at best and detrimental at worst.

Now seriously, is this the profile of someone likely to be happy with Arch? or someone who will badmouth it after 2 hours of pulling out his hair? Maybe if he had said "In the past I mostly have worked with GUI apps but I'd like to learn to go deeper" MAYBE then he might be a candidate. I agree that Arch is a very solid distro but it is by no means for the "turn the key and press the pedals" kind of "driver".

1 members found this post helpful.

If you have been using Ubuntu for a fair length of time and are used to how Debian based systems work and don't want to have to learn new things just for the sake of it then I'd be moving to Debian because it is the backbone of so many other distros. I wouldn't move to Mint, even though they do support MATE, because they use Ubuntu and modify it.

So as I see it, this is my opinion, your best option is to either install Debian Wheezy and enable Backports so things like Iceweasel ar current or maybe install Debian testing (Jessie) and use it through its testing cycle and stay with it during its stable cycle (making sure to enable backports when it becomes stable. That will give you possibly 3-4 years of one distro.

Hi. A lot of distros mentioned are built on Debian which can take more tweaking but IMHO is well worth it, after almost 20 years still my favorite and like most free to try. Best wishes and have fun.

Add: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post5090931
and "What is best distro to switch to from Ubuntu?" Most. :-)

Well, the reason I mentioned it is because the OP is a programmer. A person who can program a computer language certainly should be able to install OS like Arch. Besides, it was just a mere suggestion not a ultimatum.