I have to use ubuntu sometimes (18.04) but my personal favorite distro is Arch Linux.

- you will run the latest software

- from the very beginning you are involved and personally responsible for your machine.

- the wiki is very well written

- no periodic upgrade hell, since it has rolling updates (everything is always updating all the time)

- if software is not in the repository, it has AUR, which will help you build anything that is missing

Ubuntu is a necessary evil, but I don't like some things:

  /etc/default/apport
  /etc/default/kerneloops
  /etc/default/motd-news
  snapd
  unattended-upgrades
  ubuntu-report
  whoopsie

Well so do I (also mainly an Ubuntu user these days), but that can be orthogonal to time spent. I prefer it to Windows, which I used f/t for nearly a year after ditching macOS. I prefer the single file system (as opposed to the wsl/native Windows mishmash). I enjoy its speed (mostly filesystem related I think). I find the desktop (Gnome in my case) simpler yet more flexible at the same time (PaperWM ftw).

But there's no doubt I've spent at least 10x as much time on Ubuntu configuring and reading and fixing.

I've used Ubuntu for development for the last 5 years, but due to the quarantine & hardware issues at home, I figured I'd give Windows a shot. With WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux 2) available, it's gotten so good! I can run our dev stack with similar performance to Ubuntu inside the subsystem, while simultaneously enjoying the larger ecosystem of Windows.

The only major roadblock I encountered was with PHPStorm, as it doesn't have native access to files inside the Linux subsystem due to the different file system format. In the end I opted for running an X server on Windows (via MobaXTerm) and running PHPStorm inside the Linux subsystem.

I wouldn't mind going back to Ubuntu (and probably I'll do so when the quarantine ends), but it was a nice surprise to see how good Windows has become for dev work.