SkyKhan- Thank you, helpful. Gave me consolation that several of my fears are valid.
No, they are not valid if you choose your distro wisely.
Ubuntu at desktop is not very good now. They concentrate on other things, namely mobile and cloud.
I don't know why many people have an obsession to use and recommend it without trying other distros.
Mint is not good either any more, at least not for FPC / Lazarus users because their packages are both old and broken.
I use Manjaro now and can recommend it!
It has very recent versions of everything. For example I got FPC 3.0.2 semi-accidentally with other updates shortly after it was released.
I never have to install any new released SW from 3rd party because Manjaro has them all.
I feel frustration reading the agony of Ubuntu and Mint users because it could be avoided easily ... by using another distro.
Manjaro is a rolling distro, one would expect it to be unstable but it is not. It just keeps working. Never failed in ~2 years. Before it I had screwed my Xubuntu installation somehow and had to reinstall.
Of course there are many other good distros. For example I installed a promising SparkyLinux with KDE in a laptop and it works very well!
Like many others, it is based on Debian testing. There are also rolling distros based on Debian Sid (unstable).
Be smart. If a Linux distro does not work, please switch to another distro instead of banging your head again and again with it.