[drbaba]

I switched to Ubuntu back in 2008, and have used it on and off since then. When it first arrived, it was IMO significantly better than Debian for end users:

Debian was notoriously out of date. Debian Stable mostly contained packages that were several years out of date, and even Debian Testing often didn't have e.g. recent drivers and browser versions in its repo. Debian Unstable, on the other hand, was too unstable due to being rolling release. My subjective experience was that things like getting MP3 codecs to work or nVidia drivers installed was also a huge hassle. Ubuntu was based on Debian, but ensured that the latest versions of all these things either just worked, or could be easily enabled.

Secondly, I remember Debian as being largely a "do it yourself" option, not so different from what an Arch user today might be after. You used a curses-based installer, selected what packages to install manually, customized everything from the terminal, and so on. Ubuntu offered a cohesive desktop experience - it gave you a pre-configured Gnome desktop with all apps and drivers an everyday user might need, and slapped on a (subjectively) aesthetic and coherent theme. The installer itself was also a friendly GUI that even non-techie friends could use. If you wanted to install it, you didn't even need to know how to flash an ISO, you just put your address on the Ubuntu website and they literally mailed you a CD containing the installer - and nearly anyone could install Linux using it.

I think "peak Ubuntu" was around 2012, after that they became too large and things started going downhill. They split the Gnome user base by creating Unity instead of contributing to Gnome Shell, they split the post-X11 development by pushing Mir instead of contributing to Wayland (I think related to the failed "Ubuntu Phone"), they added Amazon ads (with privacy concerns) in the default desktop experience, then they started pushing Snaps, etc. It's been largely downhill since then, but they had already become the "default Linux distribution" targeted by companies like e.g. Steam, so they kept chugging along.

Personally, I still think Ubuntu works quite well if you want something Debian-like that is release-based (not rolling release) but updated more frequently. But I in that case prefer using Ubuntu Server edition and installing my own packages via apt, that way you get all the Ubuntu compatibility of running a mainstream distro, but you avoid most of the clutter in the default distribution. There's many forks like PopOS and Mint that can be used instead though if you want something that continues in the original spirit of Ubuntu.