A lot of friends have these problems at University. Turns out the common factor is Ubuntu. After I tell them to install Debian and enable non-free sources, they never have weird bugs again.
I've switched to Arch about a year ago and sure, the installation was a bit painful, but after that, I don't know... it just works (including the switch to the new 4.x kernel, but I'm given to understand that the jump was fairly minor). Oh, and Plasma 5 is pretty :)
I had Debian for a while, but the outdated packages were killing me (and I was on testing). Other than that, I couldn't really complain.
I would like to have a bash at Arch but I can't be bothered to install it and it doesn't have a great security reputation.
I'm not too fussed about up to date packages but a recent Python 3 would be nice.
Python 3 is a compile it yourself on centos I understand.
https://access.redhat.com/products/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/...
To be fair to Ubuntu, I've had issues with distros other than Ubuntu, though admittedly I've not used Debian much.