I think it is worth mentioning that not even Ubuntu is its own distro in the sense you seem to be talking about it; it is a derivative of Debian, and the majority of the packages are still maintained upstream.
There is also alot of room for new types of operating systems. CoreOS seems to be a operating system design that is not present in any other distro that I am aware of, and definantly not stripped down Ubuntu.
Another interesting OS design I am aware of is NixOS[1], which features a purely functional package management system.
For the typical use cases, the answer is, as always, stick with the tried and tested. However there is still plenty of unexplored space that may be superior for specific domains, and might even become superior (or more likely influence) the common case solution.
If vendors does not support your os and do not maintain packages for your os (which means compile-test-release cycle) it is the same as if it does not exist.
The curse of FreeBSD is that so-called Linux vendors doesn't take trouble to support it. There are, for example, no support for Android SDK for FreeBSD, while, being mostly Java-based it is not that difficult. The emulator and driver for debugging seems like a complicated thing, but it is not that complicated.
So, when Google or even Percona will do packaging for you, then one could say that an OS makes some sense.
There is also alot of room for new types of operating systems. CoreOS seems to be a operating system design that is not present in any other distro that I am aware of, and definantly not stripped down Ubuntu.
Another interesting OS design I am aware of is NixOS[1], which features a purely functional package management system.
For the typical use cases, the answer is, as always, stick with the tried and tested. However there is still plenty of unexplored space that may be superior for specific domains, and might even become superior (or more likely influence) the common case solution.
[1] http://nixos.org/