Debian has a lot of rough edges. I still wouldn't recommend it for a naif. You have to understand the Debian philosophy to not get angry at how Debian's default

Debian has a lot of rough edges. I still wouldn't recommend it for a naif. You have to understand the Debian philosophy to not get angry at how Debian's default install simply doesn't work (still!) with most network cards. Debian has had a lot of user-friendly polish in the last half-decade, but was pretty gnarly before then. I came over to the linux side around 2007[1], and Debian was painful with network drivers and xorg configs, whereas ubuntu just gave you the binary blobs (like most distros) and worked on making X config less painful. Debian at the time was also exceptionally slow to bring in software, and that's improved in recent years. The user-friendly reputation of Ubuntu came well before 2010 when Unity came out - basically in its early days, Ubuntu gave you a distro with APT (= bye-bye, dependency hell) and also had friendly UX as its primary goal. Debian was about user-friendliness in terms of philosophy, not in terms of UX. I now use Debian on my workstation, in the cloud, and on my home laptop. But I would never recommend it to anyone without making them aware of the Debian philosophy first, and it's a philosophy you have to buy into at least a little bit. All the other devs in my workplace are either on macs or ubuntu/unity. [1] My very first linux experience was running ShowEQ, and dependency hell made me swear off linux for almost a decade... :)