I would tend use Fedora for development, but would consider CentOS (or RHEL, if we had the budget) for production - I avoid Ubuntu like the plague.
I happen to be doing my own research on this matter. I tend to lean more toward RHEL or CentOS for production servers just because there seem to be more people using it in that capacity and it seem to be easier to get solid support or advice for those. But I prefer Ubuntu for my laptop mainly because of the size of the community, available PPAs, ease of administration, etc...
Ultimately, it seem to come down to what you are most familiar/comfortable managing. I don't see much practical difference between the distributions other than the versions of various software that they ship with by default. But that is usually rather easy to change according to your needs anyway.
I've seen the opinion of "avoid Ubuntu like the plague" expressed many times, but it is never followed up with any solid reasoning. Can you (or anyone else) give specific details on exactly why you believe Ubuntu should be avoided?
- Chris
4 reasons:
One place where I worked Ubuntu was standard, I tried it and found that it lacked at least a couple of desktop features in GNOME 2 that I found very useful in to Fedora. Fortunately, I was allowed to revert back to Fedora. Prior to that, I was using Fedora mainly by default.
Twice I came across features that I liked and Ubuntu seemed to imply they had done them, later I found the projects been initiated and sponsored largely by Red Hat. Especially as Red Hat is in the top ten contributors to the kernel, and the contribution of Ubuntu is not significant.
Ubuntu distributions are now starting to be filled with crapware and ant-privacy features features.
Ubuntu seems very good at collecting fanbois.
If I were to change from Fedora, I would probably go back to Debian.