Ubuntu Gutsy was a wonderful distro and I enjoyed it thoroughly while I had it on my desktop. I am still running it on a shorewall router, a Trac server, and a Nagios server and don't plan on upgrading for a while as those machines provide business-critical functions.
I encourage everyone to get involved in their favorite distro and possibly beta test to find the bugs in the new one. However, it is important to do your research beforehand and make sure that you're ok with the consequences of running software that's still under active development.
I get my bleeding edge fix with gentoo. I like the way the portage
system makes it easy to hack and slash the code without having to break
the package apart, as well as it's simple package sandboxing. It's not
perfect and the "stable" version tends to run behind, but I've been
running it for a long time and I'm comfortable with it's eccentricities.
Unfortunately, sometimes in playing with apps on gentoo, I find I can't easily port them onto Ubuntu. This is what led to my decision to move to Hardy before it was officially launched.
The software that wouldn't work on Gutsy works fine on Hardy, and the
desktop is getting more and more reliable every day. It's really a
wonder to watch all of the effort that goes into one of these major
distros right before launch.
As much as I enjoy Ubuntu and its rapid development, in my opinion opensuse is more mature. If I had a choice of running kubuntu or opensuse on my primary desktop, I would go with opensuse. Development and all that aside, sometimes I just want to sit down and check my email.
That's just my $0.02, so take it for what it's worth.
As for fedora, I have no opinion. I don't run it.
--
James McPhee
jmcphe@gmail.com