I'm going to chuck my 2c into this, having run pretty much everything you've mentioned.

I've never liked any rpm based distro. My first Linux was Red Hat 6.3 "Zoot", and I later used Fedora Core 3, then 4 and I've looked at 5 in a VM a few times. I don't like the package managers. This is pure personal preference.

FreeBSD is very cool, very well documented and very well put together. Software support is excellent, and the online handbook (part of that excellent documentation) lets you get neck deep in configuring all aspects of your system, from the commandline, helping you gain good knowledge of your operating system. I last ran 6.0 and quickly discovered that it does not like the SATA drives in my notebooks, so I shelved the CD's.

I have Ubuntu 6.0.6 on both my home laptop and my work laptop. It detected all my hardware, installed all my drivers, office suite and Evolution client which I have connected to exchange for me. It has a lot of graphical wizards to breeze you through mundane things. The Synaptics graphical manager is easy to use, but you can use apt-get from the command line. The lack of a root user is disconcerting at first, but you soon get used to using sudo for root priviledge tasks, which is good practise on any *nix system. I also have an Ubuntu Server 6.06 box running on the network, which is all command line based, well documented too and get you up and running with all your major services, such as web, mail, ldap, database, ftp, etc etc etc. Point is, Ubuntu is easy when you need it to be (i.e. you just need a machine to do a spreadsheet on, or reply to those annoying meeting invitations) and can be a normal Linux system where you can play with all your favourite tools on the command line.

Another disribution I love is Slackware. Very fast, very cool.

From what I've seen of Solaris, it is a great operating system, from the security tools, to stability, to useability. I just got sick of typing in Linux commands and having Solaris barf at me. My own fault. I relaced that box with a Ubuntu Server because I needed a web server and mail server fast.

Don't be afraid of easy OS'es like Ubuntu. The power goes deeper than most people think. I'd suggest FreeBSD too. Lovely operating system.