What is the best Linux distro for web dev?
To me web dev is all about customizing your work environment. Having said that, I recommend Arch Linux, because of its simplicity and high degree of customization. Starting and stopping daemons, i.e. MySQL, Mongo, Redis, etc is very straight forward. The Arch repositories, including AUR have every possible development tool you can think of, so you won't have to compile anything from source.
Ubuntu LTS variants allow the creation of 'PPA' repos of your own, so you can use apt-get for your own software.
You upload a source file & it makes a package out of it for you.
You can pretty much make a package for any distro on the planet to be installed using the default package manager. This isn't unique to Ubuntu LTS.
The best distro for web dev is the one that most closely matches your production server.
thanks! I'll look into these.