When I adopted Ubuntu, it was 2004 or so, and the difference from Debian was night-and-day. In fact, it was cks who recommended Ubuntu to me, after listening to

When I adopted Ubuntu, it was 2004 or so, and the difference from Debian was night-and-day. In fact, it was cks who recommended Ubuntu to me, after listening to various woes with the audio subsystem. I was trying to attack these hardware/driver issues one-by-one and he just said "Install Ubuntu, and be done with it!" and he was right: as soon as I installed Ubuntu, all my commodity hardware just worked, and my concerns became much higher-level, and I was a satisfied Ubuntu user for about 18 years afterward. I did vow to migrate to Debian eventually. It never completely happened, as my Lenovo went to Fedora and I eventually decided to eliminate Linux entirely from my home network. But nowadays, Debian is totally mature and able to tackle modern hardware much better than it could in 2004, and I believe that this is attributable to a lot of packaging and integration work by Canonical.