Right now I am using vanilla Debian. They have tons of packages available and they aren't pretending to be anything other than free. I really like RHEL/Centos. Buying RHEL for personal use is a bit expensive and they are pretty sparse for available packages, EPEL helps but is still way behind Debian. Once EPEL fills out more for Centos 8 I will probably switch to that. RHEL/Centos are just bulletproof if they have the software you need/want. Fedora is nice, but the constant updates (including major kernel versions) just don't work for my use case. I need a stable kernel. I work a lot with hardware and need my drivers to keep working.
I think jumping to the conclusion that there will be banner ads is a bit of an over reaction. Right now the adds are fairly innocuous, but it is still frustrating that adds are the default instead of just charging me a few dollars. I have no idea, but I would think $5 or $10 would be far more than they could get showing me a couple adds. Though if they decided to charge even $5 to download Ubuntu people would lose their minds more than they do with small adds like these, and so here we are.
What’s your Linux of choice?