I’ll never understand why people like Ubuntu. It’s a really hard toss up for me if I’d rather be stuck with Ubuntu or windows.
I remember that I attempted to install Debian on my laptop in 2009. It was ugly. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 and it was a totally different and much nicer experience. Because of that I've been on Ubuntu until they started pushing snaps very aggressively. I live booted Debian 11 and realized that its UI was exactly the same. I don't know when it happened during that dozen of years but there wasn't anymore a reason to stick to Ubuntu. I installed Debian 11 and got a faster machine with less background processes. I'm on Debian 13 now. I've been told that KDE is much better than what I attempted to use in 2014 so maybe I could give it a try, but it's unclear to me what I have to gain.
So kubuntu it was, and has been ever since. I'm currently looking into whether I should change to something else - as I've started growing tired of Ubuntu/Kubuntu after some 20 odd years.
Snap applications are still not “equal enough” to installed apps.
They have gotten better, but it’s not seamless and when you get burned it’s 2 hours debugging. Each time.
An app I use/help maintain regularly gets bug reports about sandboxed behavior. It’s understandable but the easiest fix is to install an unsandboxed version.
I personally have some extra steps in my workflow for printing from a snap application because it doesn’t just work and I don’t want to spend the hours needed to debug it.
Sure, no matter which distro you were installing you still had to provide a hostname, a domain name, some IP info (maybe), and an opinion on partitioning - there's only so many ways to ask the user these questions - but the ubuntu installer was prettier.
Around the time it was gaining popularity, almost every 'reviewer' (blogger) seemed to waste about 85% of their distro reviews talking about the installer - as though this was somehow important. The big sell of Debian, and Debian-derivatives, is that you install once, and then it's just in-place upgrades forever. The distro-hoppers, Microsoft evacuees, content-creators, etc - didn't really get that.
Anyway, once Ubuntu was installed it was much the same to operate as a Debian box. Obviously there were some surprising differences. Unity. Mir. One Cloud. Wubi. Upstart. Bazaar.
I came to Ubuntu because Wine worked on it with no effort. Yes, this was a long time ago. I have certainly cursed some of their changes since then, but I don’t want to spend my time doing yet another sysadmin job, so the less I change the better.
I’d rather flip the question back on you, how is Ubuntu better than, say, Rocky? If you say “upgrading is easier” I’ll chuckle for the rest of the day.