@AC and others
I used to be a committed RedHat user for my allways-with-me workhorse laptop(s), from 4.1 through 9.1 (or was it 2), and when Fedora came alone, I got fed up with the speed that Fedora changed. You just could not use a Fedora release for more than about 9 months, and still expect the repositories to remain for that package that needed a library that you had not yet installed.
Also, when you update, you pick up a new kernel, and all of the modules that you had compiled need frigging or recompiling (my current bugbear is the DVB-T TV adapter I use).
I switched to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS mainly because I liked the support that they promised, and have delivered. Also the repositories are extensive, and are maintained.
Here I am again, two years later, and I can remain on Dapper if I want to (for quite a while) but I am finding that it is taking longer and longer for new things to be back-ported, and I have had problems with getting Compiz/Beryl or whatever the merged package is working with GLx or the binary drivers from ATI.
I am going to go to 8.04 (LTS again) for the same reasons as before, and I am removing the last remains of the RedHat 9 from my trusty Thinkpad T30 (the disk has moved/been cloned several times, keeping the machine the same, just on different hardware - ain't Linux good).
I wish there was an upgrade from 6.06 to 8.04, but I guess that one re-install every two years is not too much to put up with, especially as I choose to keep my home directory on a seperate partition.
I may give Fedora 9 a try on USB stick, just to see how things have changed, but I think that Ubuntu is still my preferred choice. This is mainly because I use my laptop as a tool, not as an end in itself. I just do not have the time to be fiddling all the time.
I know that this is petty, but I feel that we absolutly need ONE dominant Linux distro, so that we can achieve enough market penetration to make software writers take note. Ubuntu is STILL the best candidate for this as far as I can see, because of its ease-of-use, good support, and extensive device support.
If the Fedora community want to come up with a long-term release strategy, then I think that they could move into this space, but as most non-computerate users will generally keep the same OS on a system that it came delivered with for the lifetime of the machine. If they have to perform a major upgrade, most will discard the machine and buy a new one. This means that we need distributions with an effective lifetime of several years to get the needed penetration.
Tux, obviously.