I use it. It’s fine. Livepatch is nice, not needing to reboot to apply kernel updates can make the “boot computer, install updates, reboot computer” cycle a bit shorter. Maybe Fedora also has that? Arch and friends certainly don’t do it.
Snap is an annoying feature that mostly just makes life harder for people starting out on Ubuntu. If you’re here, chances are you can run the three or four commands to rid yourself of Snap. Snap has also gotten better in terms of performance, though the store situation still sucks.
Snap’s RAM impact is minimal. You end up with multiple versions of the same dependency in memory (wasting tens to hundreds of megabytes) but the same is true for Flatpak or Docker or AppImage. My biggest annoyance is snaps mounting on boot and taking a few seconds, but it’s really not that bad. Actually, that’s a lie, my biggest annoyance is the (ノಠ益ಠ)ノlowercase “snap” folder in my home directory ლ(ಠ益ಠლ) that you can’t remove or snap will break.
The Amazon search thing was what, ten years ago? Just click no on the “do you want to submit debug logs” prompt.
I personally use the default desktop. Gnome is fine. Some people are married to their Windows clones, for those Cinnamon or KDE is also fine.
I would indeed recommend Ubuntu stable. Being able to install the OS and not risk breaking anything for half a decade is pretty nice. Certainly beats my Arch-derivatives experience. Ubuntu and Kubuntu both come with the standard suite of tools you’d expect for those desktop environments. You can even install both (though you’ll have tons of duplicate applications if you do).
Fedora does more frequent updates, with more changes over time and more stuff possibly breaking. If you want the latest and greatest, Fedora may be better. Software is generally less supported on Fedora though. I also kind of trust IBM even less than I do Canonical to do the right thing, so there’s that.
The biggest problem with Ubuntu is that it’s popular and has been for years. A lot of old “helpful” forum topics will have you open up a terminal, paste some random commands, and break your OS next time you try to update. I’d recommend avoiding any terminal commands for as long as possible when it comes to troubleshooting. The GUI does most things pretty well these days.