Fun, as in you have to know C to be able to debug the driver for your sound card? Because like it or not, that's what Linux is known for... and whether it's the reality or not, it's going to take a lot of years and PR for the perception to change.
It's great for running apache though, I'm sure... if you need that kind of thing.
Why would you need to learn C for Ubuntu? That's kind of ridiculous, don't you think? It worked great for me, hell, I think I managed to play a few games on it with little or no tweaks on it.
Sure, the general perception is like that. Every distro is different though. Hell, you can even make your own Linux distro if your good enough. Ubuntu is by far the easiest Linux OS to use in my book.