Ubuntu is sometimes thought of as the beginner's distro, something that more advanced users don't care about - they think if you're advanced, you need Slackware or something where you have to build it from scratch, rewrite or add parts to the kernel to make it more compatible to your system, write your own drivers, etc, but that just takes up time. Of all the distros I've tried, Ubuntu is the fastest, most reliable, and (most of the time) most compatible.