I'm not sure that anyone actually nailed the complete reason. I scanned through the response so far but none seem to really cover it.

1. Debian policy -- this is by far the biggest reason, Debian policy is very detailed and packages are required to adhere to it to be in the official repos
2. Debian repository -- it contains nearly all open source software, which combined with 1 makes Debian/Ubuntu based systems much more stable in general
3. deb format -- this is actually more of a toss up but the deb format is still much more flexible than rpm
4. apt -- existed since at least the mid 90s, long before yum was added to replicate the feature on rpm based distros, so not so much a reason now

I might have missed some additional reasons but the above are the biggest. You can still break a Debian/Ubuntu system but that is usually due to using non-official repositories by people who haven't properly made debs, eg some random launchpad ppa, which haven't gone through vetting process via Ubuntu REVU, or lintian, etc.

I've used Debian/been a DD for 13 years, and used Ubuntu/core dev for 7 years. I've used RH/Fedora on and off for 15 years.

lol, you predate me a bit, I didn't start using Linux until around Feb 1995.

I don't remember anyone complaining about Windows 95 interface, maybe that it was unstable, but not its interface. Windows 3's interface was so horrible I just used DOS instead.

Your user id is so high were you even born yet when Windows 95 came out? ;-)

The best way to be able to tell if the location services bug was likely affecting you is to turn on the display option and see how often it is being polled. For my wife's 4S it appeared to be always on for the time setting location service.

Microsoft is planning to force the tablet UI on you as well with Windows 8 next year...

I've used Linux since 1995, Debian since 1998 and Ubuntu since mid 2004, when the first 4.10 test release came out. Ubuntu Unity and Gnome 3 may be perfectly useful for computer newbies, who have no prior experience with any OS, but they are both very annoying for experienced computer users and unfortunately Windows 8 looks to be more of the same. So I switched to Xubuntu apparently the only decent option left, and I seem to be in good company there with Linus having switched to Xfce as well. I used to work for Canonical but really don't get what they are attempting to do. They kept talking about wanting to jump the chasm but it seems to be more of jumping the shark, losing a lot of their long time users in the process.

If they are attempting to reinvent all the OSes for tablet use, which is the only sane reason for this interface change, they are going to fail badly and lose their desktop and laptop share in the process. Apple's already won the tablet market, with Android trailing far behind, and chasing after it this late in the game is not going to be of much use.

Conroe is the county seat of Montgomery county which has nearly 500,000 people. So while there may only be 56,207 people in Conroe itself, apparently wikipedia hasn't been updated, its in a much larger county, a fair chunk of Conroe's ETJ was ceded so that The Woodlands can form a city in a few years. Oh and they also managed to get an Intel processor named after the town.

And I live there. :-)

Firefox and all the Netscape/Mozilla based browsers before it have always seemed to use all available memory on my system. I do not close my browser down often though so it may be that it is just really leaky like the previous poster said.

Yes, the 32-bit flash version running on 64-bit Ubuntu would crash very often. I switched to the 64-bit packages provided by kees in his ppa http://launchpad.net/~kees/ years ago but since Adobe has now dropped 64-bit Flash for Linux it will probably not be installable anymore. The 64-bit version was much more reliable at least as reliable as Flash ever is, of course it still ate CPU like crazy as it does on every platform.

And I assume you have never heard of server black lists, like the DNSBL I have even had emails I sent to myself not make it to the other end due to similar reasons, and yes when they are blackholed they don't even show up in the recipients spam folder.