You definitely want to ignore everybody who doesn’t say Ubuntu, because the only reason they mention that is “because <other distro> worked great for them”. Fact: no distro has worked best for as many people as Ubuntu has, so you’ll have the highest chance of that working for you best by trying that.
What I liked most about the customization thing is that you slowly discover more ways to customize it as you get to learn your way around the system. The first thing you want to do, though, is read the included documentation (when you don’t know how to do something). Get to know the system (this will take a while), then start taking advantage of it :)