When I fist started using Debian, it was a bit of a potato. It improved over time but still felt a little wooden. Ubuntu brought a lot of people back into the Debian ecosystem, ensured that it improved constantly to the point where it's a corporate power buster, and I feel like the next release will hit the bullseye for sure.

While most of my systems are on Debian, the installation experience could really use some work, especially the partitioning part. I've had several occasions when I had to resort to fully manually partitioning my drives because of some hickup.

Even in Debian 10, swap is enabled by default in the installer (maybe depending on system RAM) and the encryption guide will refuse to proceed in that case. Only way out of that is switching to another TTY and disabling it manually. The situation and docs around networking and DNS are a bit of a mess with regards to the not-yet-complete migration to systemd services from ifupdown and resolveconf. At least it's not defaulting to networkmanager.

At the same time, selecting UTC as timezone from the installer is weirdly hard to find, a lot is predetermined from "select your location".

It's like it's still designed with the use case of non-technical desktop users from 15 years ago in mind

I'm suspecting very few Debian lovers actually use the installer and instead prepare their own installation with self-built images ready for flashing or upload. It says something that Arch Linux, which doesn't have a guided or graphical installation, is a smoother installation experience for a user new to the distro. The wikis for each are night and day.

Don't get me wrong, I love Debian too but there's some areas where it's unnecessarily confusing for those who haven't grown accustomed to its quirks over the years.

> Debian is the best.

I just really wish they had an answer to Ubuntu's HWE stack[1] for mid-Stable hardware updates :(

(Backports don't count due to their ad-hoc & unsupported nature)

[1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack