Tooling up for osmocom, gnuradio, and android ... suggestions ?

[John Case]

I am a mac and NetBSD user and have not run any linux systems for many years. 
I have never used Debian/Ubuntu/etc.

Now I would like to begin doing work with osmocom, GNU radio, SDRs and some 
android development.

I knw it's a religious question, but since I am starting with a completely 
blank slate, what would be the simplest, most painless distro to set up a 
development and build environment (cross compiling for arm, building osmocom, 
gnu radio, and running android development tools and SDKs) ?

I assume the answer must be either Debian or Ubuntu, but really have no idea 
... comments ?

I think the nicest thing would be a distro that *already* had a full complement 
of the GNU devel/conf/build tools that all the examples in the wiki rely on ... 
so I wouldn;t have to worry about getting that environment up from scratch ...

Thanks.