Well you will get lots of advice as to what is better than Ubuntu. It has
its share of fans and detractors. I have tried them all and have stuck with
Canonical through thick and thin since 2005. I still try out other distros,
but always go back because it has the most of everything; most packages,
most choice, most support, biggest community. It is not driven by ideology
as Debian is so you don't have to watch what you say for fear someone is
going to jump all over you. It just feels right to me. I don't believe for a
second that it is best for everybody.

Even with Ubuntu's family there is lots of choice. I run Kubuntu which is
from the same folks but it uses KDE and they tend to leave you alone, i.e.
they aren't changing the interface all of the time. There is also Xubuntu
which is XFCE based and it is going to replace GNOME Classic for many people
as the desktop of choice when GNOME phases it out later this year. There are
other choices such as Lubuntu which uses lightweight (and less powerful)
LXDE. If you want to go a bit farther from the tree you can run Mint which
is not from Canonical at all, but is based on Ubuntu. It uses a modified
GNOME but will switch to GNOME 3 and change it up with the next release.
There are a few Debian based distros that also are worth considering,
aptosid and MEPIS spring to mind. Then you can go to the dark side ;) and
run rpm based distros where there are many excellent choices, Mandriva,
PCLinuxOS, openSuSE and Fedora. Generally RPM distros offer less choice,
fewer packages, fewer outside repositories and less support. That does not
make them bad. Many people do not mind limitations. If I was not running
Kubuntu happily then I would run Fedora, but it is for power users and is
not newbie friendly.

There really is no end to choice with over 400 to choose from and then with
all of the combinations of desktops you can go wild. My over 10 years of
distro hopping has led me to a couple of conclusions. There is no perfect
distro and some distros work better than others with some equipment. What
works for one person is not necessarily going to be universal which is very
different from what former Windows users are used to, because the hardware
was made to run Windows and not Linux. That being said, Linux has come a
long way from the old days and now most things work out of the box. It is
those few hardware inconsistencies that keep it from wider adoption.