There's no "best distro", but watch out for Java itself. Because Java was not originally open source, the Sun JVMs and JDKs were not provided with any of the major non-commercial distros. Instead, an incomplete Java implementation was provided (gcj).
Gcj was missing critical functionality for Swing apps and for
J2EE servers, so for those platforms you needed to download and install a "real" Java such as the Sun standard or IBM jikes. And you needed to make sure that they got used instead of the gcj Java.
A lot of progress has been made recently, however. I don't think it's yet safe to do professional Java with what comes bundled with a distro like Ubuntu, but it should be before much longer.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.