Ubuntu is quite good for linux beginners, but their repositories are out of date. If you want the newest version, you always have to find the *.deb or install it from source, which is not that pleasant if you're not used to it. That's the reason I'm moving on to archlinux. It's a load of work to install a full GUI desktop on it, but you'll have exactly what you want and you will know exactly how it works. Also, the software in their repositories is very up-to-date

And I can understand why you want 0.9.30. It was the first version I found pleasant to work with (one debugger issue was finally gone).

I have to give that docking package a try too. I found it annoying to have all those IDE windows live separately on my taskbar. Thanks for that