I've used the Ubuntu version of Linux for a little over a year. Here's why:
I toyed with Linux a few years ago on a mini laptop that I had that had a corrupted hard drive. At that time Linux wasn't the easiest to work with, flash drives weren't that big, and the hard drive was half disk and half solid state, so the laptop was just toast.
Well last year, the hard drive on my laptop got corrupted. All my info was still there, but I lost the boot sector that contained Windows. And for the first time ever, I had not made a recover disk for Windows, so I would have had to buy another Windows disk, if I wanted reinstall Windows. In the mean time, before I knew Windows was gone as an operating system from my hard drive (though I suspected that I could possibly come up with another boot sector on my hard drive), I discovered the joy of trying to recover a Windows hard drive with Linux.
And during my quest for the easiest Linux version for a semi-skilled computer user like me, I stumbled upon Ubuntu. Many sites listed it as easy to install and use (http://www.pcworld.com/article/2947333/operating-systems/the-best-linux-distributions-for-beginners.html), and I liked that it was meant to be all open source - not free and commercial versions Ubuntu about.
I liked that it is a compact operating system, and I am still running it on a 32 GB. But I'll be getting a new hard drive in days, because running a computer solely on a flash drive is really too much for the flash drive. Which reminds me, I need to do a backup.
I can run almost anything I want to on it, and I can also run a few things in a virtual Windows machine, if I need to.