Oddly enough I too have been recently look for alternatives to Ubuntu. I haven't even upgraded to 13.10 because I know it will destroy my install. Unfortunately I've never tried out Fedora, though I thought about using CentOS as a desktop in order to better understand it if I have to use it as a server OS (as it's quite popular). How has Fedora been working for you?
I'm really loving Fedora. I hadn't played with yum too much in the past, but I have used Mercurial and this is a little nicer. The GNOME desktop is really clean and I enjoy how smoothly everything comes together. As a whole it's not a massive burden on my computer and runs quickly, and it's a lot less clunky than things I've used previously, especially Ubuntu. It can be really stripped down or built up without much effort in either direction.