The problem, like everything Ubuntu, is that it may be 'user friendly' when everything works perfectly, but when you want to do something different or something fails, it's anything but. You're left fighting multiple levels of indirection, trying to figure out what the system is actually doing so you can fix it. Much of the indirection comes from Debian, but it seems Ubuntu finds a single use-case, and then builds more indirection on top of the Debian indirection.

Needing to download 5GB of intermediate packages to go from karmic -> oneiric one release at a time (way to ruin apt-get, guys), a weekend fighting remotely with what turned out to be nouveau (which given its hard locking a fresh install, shouldn't even be enabled by default), and Unity tonedeafness have signalled to me that it's time to move on.

I'm giving Arch a try, and it's refreshing that I can just edit /boot/grub/menu.lst without having to figure out the abstraction built on top to do things the "right way" (and avoid being overwritten). However, if Arch doesn't work out, I'm settled on straight up Debian. At least with Debian, the indirections actually get me something.