You get more recent and frequent package updates running on Fedora or CentOS (RHEL derivatives).
Fedora is a little more aggressive than Ubuntu about packaging newer software. That's why I switched back in 2009. It's not a huge difference, though. Both of them normally package the latest stable version and only push minor version updates during a release. RHEL derivatives by design are much slower to update. What you got when you installed RHEL 5.0 in 2007 is, for the most part, the same as what you get when you install RHEL 5.7 in 2011.
For evidence, compare the packages tables linked to below.
I can't stand the apt-get package manager from the command line. I prefer yum over apt-get any day of the week. I understand you can install synaptic, I'd rather not have to. Yum also has the wonderful yum-plugin-priorities package for maintaining a number of repos with specific priorities and hierarchical rules for determining which packages to update from which repositories. There are also plugins for finding the fastest mirror and protected the base packages so you don't bomb an app updating
I don't want to engage in the perpetual package manager holy war, but I will add that apt has package pinning (the equivalent of yum-plugin-priorities and yum-protectbase).
Fedora is a little more aggressive than Ubuntu about packaging newer software. That's why I switched back in 2009. It's not a huge difference, though. Both of them normally package the latest stable version and only push minor version updates during a release. RHEL derivatives by design are much slower to update. What you got when you installed RHEL 5.0 in 2007 is, for the most part, the same as what you get when you install RHEL 5.7 in 2011.
For evidence, compare the packages tables linked to below.
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=fedora http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=redhat
I can't stand the apt-get package manager from the command line. I prefer yum over apt-get any day of the week. I understand you can install synaptic, I'd rather not have to. Yum also has the wonderful yum-plugin-priorities package for maintaining a number of repos with specific priorities and hierarchical rules for determining which packages to update from which repositories. There are also plugins for finding the fastest mirror and protected the base packages so you don't bomb an app updating
I don't want to engage in the perpetual package manager holy war, but I will add that apt has package pinning (the equivalent of yum-plugin-priorities and yum-protectbase).