Compare Ubuntu to Fedora Core 3 (Score 1)

Let's just say that I'm a relative newbie and I want to a good, simple distro for my older laptop. I dislike Mandrake because I can't stand eight million applications installed by default. I want Gnome 2.8 (KDE is not my cup of tea), a good perl and c++ programming environment, and a decent office suite (and Firefox and Thunderbird). I also want an easy update method. Fedora and Ubuntu both seem to fit this bill. I'm leaning toward Ubuntu because it comes on just one cd, versus four for Fedora. Can anyone weigh in on the relative merits of each distro? Which would you recommend over the other, and why?