A dev. Likes Haskell. Abusing Compose key.

Ubuntu is promoted as a newbie-friendly distro, so sometimes I'm helping peoples here, and even have it somewhere. But I'm a Archlinux user, and if you're a developer, you may consider moving there (note: it is definitely not newbie-friendly), because of:

1. Latest versions of everything. Opposite to what people think, versions freeze, being practiced by Ubuntu (especially LTS), in common usage (read as "not in servers") doesn't help to stability much (that's why KDE Neon appeared though we had Kubuntu).
2. A built-in and easy to use system to build'n'install packages from a source code, and a user repository with such packages (i.e. AUR).
3. (optional) faster boot. I blamed systemd for booting blazingly fast, but now that Ubuntu moved to systemd either, and (I still having Ubuntu on one partition) it still boots 3-4 times slower, I dunno. I researched in the past (before moving to systemd) the reasons, to no avail.

Things you might want after considering Archlinux fully installed and configured.

1. Install vaapi for your drivers, and chromium with vaapi patch^AUR (firefox video acceleration unfortunately yet to come, but you might still be interested in firefox because of pentadactyl and don't forget qutebrowser which is even better than the dropped Firefox+Pentadactyl ever was).
2. Enable middle mouse click scroll for gtk3 based apps.
3. sudo systemctl enable systemd-resolved to enable DNS cache.

If you don't feel like it, consider also Fedora. This is a distro by Red Hat, who are developers of tons of projects. Fedora gets a lot of testing, and has much less dated packages than Ubuntu. I wouldn't like to recommend it to newbies, since a few things require manual tweaking (e.g. out-of-the-box youtube videos may not work due to missing codecs that require a separate repository), but otherwise it is a very decent distro.