Well, that's what you get for running Ubuntu in a dev environment. It's a distribution that's meant to be installed from Ubuntu's repositories, only updated from those same repositories, and never really used for any third party software. I've got a 75+ year old guy using it, because he kept getting infected when he was running Windows. Hasn't had any problems with it at all, other than when a stick of memory went bad, and it started crashing all the time.
For stable servers (and even workstations) I've been running Debian since at least as far back as 1997. There were some issues like you describe in the first 5 years or so, but honestly, the only thing I've run across in the last 5 years was when I tried to do a database server upgrade, and uninstalled the old postgreSQL version 7 before migrating the data to the new version 8 server. That was a relatively easy fix, though, and it only happened because I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing. Other than that, every Debian machine I maintain (and there are A LOT of them...) just runs perfectly.
I have a customer who installed an Ubuntu server because "it has a GUI and it'll be easy for me to use". I stuck with it for a while because they liked it, solving problem after problem that cropped up because we kept needing to add third party software to it, which broke on literally EVERY SINGLE kernel upgrade.
Finally, I figured out the amount of time I'd spent fixing shit that wouldn't have broken if we'd been using Debian, and how long it would take me to back up, blow away, install Debian, and restore data. Turned out the customer would have been 4 figures richer if I hadn't had to fix all the Ubuntu screwups over a couple of years. Recommended migrating to Debian, they agreed, and that machine hasn't had a problem since. That was 6 months ago.