I've used loads of Linux distributions in the past. Each of them had its advantages and disadvantages - there's simply no "perfect" OS...

Gentoo and Debian basically don't have any "releases" - updates come in frequently. When you wake up, turn on your computer, it tells you that there are updates, you install them and want to start working - and bang, one of theses updates breaks your apache/ssh/ruby/you-name-it. Pretty bad for your productivity.

Fedora, Ubuntu, and SUSE do have time-based releases. Updates come in once or twice a year and you know that in between only security fixes will be deployed to your machine. That's nice since the probability of an update breaking your installation is minimal.

I'm on Ubuntu right now and it gives me a stable system. But sometimes it feels "out-of-date" and I'd like to have a more recent version of an application, escpecially if it's non-critical for work.

Ubuntu has a very neat feature for this: Specialized repositories for different programs hosted on launchpad.net called PPAs (Personal Package Archives). You enable a PPA by appending the sources.list contents shown on the PPA page to the file /etc/apt/sources.list.

So, here's the list of my top 10 PPAs: