I care less about the base OS and more about the tools that help me get work done. That said, Ubuntu has never let me down in supporting even the latest hardware right out of the box.
I run terminator for my tmux + vim dev sessions and chrome DWM (dwm.suckless.org) ...all setup through my .dotfiles (github.com/ruebenramirez/.dotfiles). The readme on there is a little dated; I moved over to Thinkpads for most of my work. If you're interested in automating your development environment config, give the Makefile a read.