If you are reasonable comfortable in Linux and a developer, I'd strongly recommend Arch with i3 window manager. Pacman is fantastic. The initial setup is a bit of a pain, but it's so much smoother and more stable from that point forward.
How is maintaining an Arch installation "so much smoother"? The user must carefully review a PKGBUILD every time any installed AUR package needs to be updated[1], which will happen frequently because the user will need many AUR packages to make up for the fact that there are only 10,200 Arch packages[2], much less than Ubuntu's 81,563 packages[3].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/3yiq4s/is_the_au...
[2] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/
[3] https://packages.ubuntu.com/cosmic/allpackages?format=txt.gz
I moved back to Ubuntu only so I could use the same ansible scripts locally as prod.