I am a Linux traditionalist. 'New', cutting-edge distros such as Fedora and Gentoo are terrifying conglomerations riding the high currents of trendy changes within the Open-Source world, and more often than not, upgrading a version comes with a substantial learning curve for new packages, daemons, or systems. On my home systems, stability is more desirable than features.
Eventually, however, I got desperate for updated packages, which my Debian (Lenny)-powered desktop couldn't provide without installing from source. And I am pleased to find that the switch from Debian 5 to Ubuntu 9.10 was extremely easy. Many of my previous complaints about Ubuntu are null, especially those regarding the 'simplicity' of the distribution--hardly! After some minor tweaks to my tastes--for example, giving root a password, installing the full vim package (not having the full version of vim was a major irritation), installing Subversion and Bazaar, the latest nVidia driver, SRWare Iron (a fork of Google Chrome that does away with all the privacy-violating nonsense), etc--I am just about settled in. Ironically, my system is much cleaner and leaner than the old Debian system, which had been collecting dust for a few years and had begun to act...odd.
Sure, I've spoken out against Ubuntu many times to anyone who will listen. But there was no use sticking with an operating system that was beginning to get in the way more than it served, and as Ubuntu shares its Debian ancestory--including dpkg, which I find more friendly than rpm--the switchover was easy and painless. I still prefer Debian on my server though--stability, stability!