I prefer Redhat distributions to install secure firewall installations because of the sensible admin tools and the ease of dsl setup.

For a desktop system I like to quickly be able to install packages and Ubuntu uses Synaptic and it's quick. Fedora uses Yum and the update process in comparison to Ubuntu is glacial. They have made speed improvements but it's still a world wide wait for it to download the latest information.

Update: To be fair I have recently discovered the glacial slowness was due to the development repository changing so rapidly that yum had to redownload all the information everytime I ran it. Using the 7 series release and update repos plus livna yum is now OK speed wise from my pov.