UBUNTU SOAKS UP NOOBS AND LETS ELITISTS FORM SEKRIT CLUBS

Disliking a vanilla distro is redundant, because it does everything your less user friendly distro does (more or less).

Ubuntu dumbs down the learning process for Linux, to about the equivalent of OS X. A user who is new to Linux and has 12.04 with Unity may not ever use a Sudo command or even open a terminal, much less understand the capabilities of the open source and free packages available to them, and the tools a their disposal (SSH for example).

Assuming the hard ware is relatively new (well new enough to not encounter any graphical, wireless, or sound driver issues), the Ubuntu 12.04 new user will never encounter a problem, install packages and updates through the GUI application, or through 1 click installs downloaded on Firefox or Chrome.

For these reasons, a lot of veteran or even new, yet determined GNU/Linux, BSD, and HURD users automatically dislike Ubuntu, and it's userbase, because of the shortcuts they take to use their Operating System. Linux draws a large community of technically inclined, or at least interested people who seek to improve said skills, and understand more about computers, and they can see Ubuntu as counteracting this, or if you will, dumbing down their community they've worked so hard to create.

I think in the end one must accept there will always be ignorant, unwilling end-users who are not interested in the how or why, but simply want to use LibreOffice and Firefox and Skype and Facebook. We can be thankful a distro such as Ubuntu exists for these users, so the Fedora, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, OpenSUSE, BSD, etc communities can thrive without such distractions.