Ubuntu is indeed an excellent distro....
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
I am proud to say that Ubuntu is South African inspired and led - Mark Shuttleworth (S.A. astronaut and coder) has been the chief architect of the concept of Ubuntu Linux.
Guadalinex is a Debian based GNU/Linux distribution promoted by the government of Andalusia (Spain). It's used in schools, public libraries, centers for elderly people and special info centers on over 100,000 PCs. Recently, Guadalinex announced that the next version would be based on Ubuntu.
See
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/guadalinex for a translation of their justification.