I used to be a sysadmin in a web hosting company so I know my way around CentOS systems which are basically the same as Fedora both being derived from Red Hat. I liked the system and their SELinux configuration was really good. Package updates were reliable and easy though sometimes a bit out of date.

I found Debian to be rock solid but quite out of date and back porting something was generally not a good idea, it generated too many errors and complex problems with dependencies etc.

Ubuntu, specifically Mint, is something I have installed on a few peoples machines and they found it fine, no complaints really, until they tried to do something more complex or advanced. They could usually get one complex thing done but without lots of experience they tended to have one thing interfere with another and just make things unstable. I got one person to use a VM for some stuff as a work around and it was much easier from there. That said the defaults are good if you have a modern machine and don't want to make massive complex changes.

As a server I really don't like Ubuntu. They did things their own way to avoid systemd and honestly it was a nightmare to administer. Much better for me to switch to Debian for stable stuff or to CentOS or Arch for complex stuff.

The biggest advantage for Ubuntu based distros is the user base. Lots of people in lots of forums documenting their problems and eventual solutions. That seems to be shifting with Bazzite and CachyOS getting massive install bases in fairly short times, especially around Steam Deck style machines. I expect we will have more more change in that direction over the next few years and honestly more users means more of a useful position in the market driving more support from developers so I am all for it.

But yeah, using the CLI is harder at first because you have all the keys as an option and no idea what the names of things are, but it can get really fun especially when you start chaining commands together. For example, you can find files name *.log, grep a specific line out of them, the sort by time and merge it all together. The output is all the logs from these different files that match your search but in appropriate time sequence and it makes troubleshooting way easier. Or you can search for all files in your whole filesystem which match a characteristic like who owns them, check their sizes, and present the largest 10. All with a few pipes and filters. It makes you feel like you need a hoodie, dark glasses, and a projector blasting green text over your face while playing trance in the background.