You can try Debian if you're interested in learning about open source politics. Many people prefer this one, actually, as it seems to be more for developers by developers. But that doesn't mean that it's either friendly or a good learning experience.

Debian tends to be a distribution one ends up at - I've seen many comment on switching to Debian, but not many switching from...

The politics can, generally, be completely ignored unless you're actually interested.

The initial installation can be a bit rough on a newbie - especially those that select expert mode, get dumped into dselect (which isn't the most intuitive tool I've used), and refuse to read the help/manual... But once installed it's very easy to keep up to date, or occasionally upgrade to the latest "stable" release. It was a long time since I did an install from scratch...

At least it used to be that the Debian installation procedure asked more questions of you than say RedHat, but also left you with a better configured system immediately after installation.

/Michael