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

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.