resk: I shall reword that as it was a bad choice for me. My goal at the time was to learn about unix and to get my feet wet with coding. This is certainly possible with Ubuntu, but I feel like I would have benefited more from a distro that requires some more reading and holds your hand less. e.g. I was installing everything from the Software Manager (or idk how it's called) -- I got introduced to the command line interface of the package manager much later by a friend. Whenever something broke, I was searching the forums and copy-pasting anything I found, hoping something would work -- I say it was a bad choice because it took me longer to snap out from this mentality than it would have with something less desktop and ease-of-use oriented. I wish a friend showed me how to install a minimal Debian (or even Ubuntu) for example and set up my own desktop environment. On the other hand, Gentoo or Arch would have scared me away for sure as a first distro. So my problem wasn't really Ubuntu, rather that it had a full DE and everything handed to you, so for the first 1-2 years I really didn't learn much about unix (which is my fault), just switched my Windows 7 desktop to something with different colors and buttons. I needed to peek behind the curtain to realize there is so much more to it. Ironically, this came with Crunchbang linux, which was also based on Ubuntu, the only difference was it didn't have a full DE, just openbox. This pushed me to discover the system, as I didn't understand / knew how to do anything -- before, I thought I can't even change the status bar color (and I wasn't thinking about it, really), let alone replace it with a different program. :)

For what would I recommend... that's a good quesiton. If the person in question has the same goals as I did, then a minimal Debian install, something like tldp.org and a friend with a lot of patience :)