Horses for courses. For many of us it is extremely important that any
operating system works solidly first time out of the box. Dapper was,
in my case,the release that happened to be on the CD that I was given
by a friend to try. Then I became hooked! Because it just worked. As a
tool used for my type of business it is superb and I am not into
reinventing the wheel :o)

On another machine [a laptop] HH runs quite happily for "my purposes"
as an XP replacement, and the main system server runs FreeBSD. However
I tried a number of different releases before settling on these, most
being discarded within the first hour.

If a particular release provides the facility needed, why upgrade for
the operating system for the sake of it. There are marked differences
between hobbyist users who enjoy the odd challenge and business users,
many of whom have considerably better things to do with their limited
spare time.

In my experience one of the problems associated with Linux in the past
has been the plethora of out of date information liberally scattered
across the web. This being exacerbated by the continual short term
release schedules of some distros. In the last few years this
situation has considerably improved. Undoubtedly the Ubuntu issues and
releases are a huge improvement on anything that I have seen that has
gone before. Ubuntu with its excellent support and dedicated forum was
the reason that I finally parted company with MS products altogether.