Arbitrary personal anecdotes

Snore.  I could offer an arbitrary personal anecdote about why I left Ubuntu, after having
used it from its first release, to go to Fedora.  The differences between the distros, even
though they are completely disjoint in terms of distribution engineering, are so incredibly
small as to be almost not worth mentioning.

Some people run into stuff that doesn't work in Fedora and does in Ubuntu.  Some people run
into stuff that doesn't work in Ubuntu and does in Fedora.  They both include the same
desktop(s), use the same X server, include Firefox and OpenOffice and Evolution, run in x86
and x86-64 and some other archs, include all the same little miscellaneous desktop apps like
Pidgin or Rhythmbox, use udev and HAL, etc.

Even many of the core low-level "distro specific" technologies are the exact same with each -
both include Pulseaudio, FC9 is using upstart, and the next versions of each will be using
PackageKit for software updates and installation.  Once kernel mode-setting is in they'll
probably be using the same graphical bootup sequence tools, too.

They include the same server tools - Apache, Dovecot, Exim, Postfix, Sendmail, MySQL,
PostgreSQL, Courier, sshd, etc.

It's taken a while, but the last few years have finally started to see a lot of once
distro-specific work pushed into upstream projects.  Other than the low-level packaging tool,
the only place the distros differ any more is in the experimental areas where all the distros
are trying out different things, until eventually one comes out the clear winner and all the
other distros adopt it.  That is, the only places the distros differ are where there's no
clear superior solution!