Ubuntu has never been remotely stable for me. Something stupid breaks or becomes difficult to get what I want out of it.

Been that way since it came out for me.

I find Arch much less hassle than Ubuntu ever was.

Just recently put Ubuntu on a machine for a work project. It was broken from the get go, throwing errors and being it's usual shitty self.

I could never recommend it.

Fedora on the other hand has been on a spare laptop for about 6 months and I gotta say they really have put some polish in. Updates are frequent but reasonable and most everything works well. Some small issues but they are not show stoppers and Fedora is aware of them.

And I like having my software up-to-date. It sucked ass when I was on Mint and one of my favorite programs had an update and I had to wait months for it to hit the repos.

I've been thinking about Debian and Ultramarine Linux (fedora but with drivers and less setup)

It's always been bad practice to just blindly update software. That's why we have different distros.

Ubuntu and Mint hold your hand and make it easy for newcomers. Great way to dive into Linux. I completely agree these are great for "it just works" and no fuss. I've not had one break on me.

Arch and Gentoo expect you to have experience and know what you're doing. You build it up how you want it. That's what makes these so great. But you need the experience and knowledge.

I've personally tried openSUSE and in my opinion it feels like a good middle ground between both ends. In the past I've recommended Mint to get started, openSUSE once you've got experience, and then Arch for when you want total control.