Although Ubuntu is a glorified copy of Debian, the components that Ubuntu changes tend to be brittle and unstable, and not adequately justified. If anyone wants an OS that helps them get stuff done, not mess with their work, and not even break between major upgrades, Debian is the way to go.
There was a time when Ubuntu had hugely better usability than Debian. Nowdays, Debian has mostly closed the gap. Thank you Canonical for the competition! Ubuntu/Canonical has lost its focus on the desktop. Desktops are boring now. Servers are more profitable and the entry to mobile has failed.
Maybe another window has opened for some desktop innovation now? I would try to copy stuff from Android. Snap [0] is a promising way to deploy apps (in general, self-contained stuff you cannot depend on), even commercial/proprietary ones. The "app store" is terrible, though. Androids intents might be worthwhile to copy to decouple things. Androids activity lifecycle might be interesting. All of this requires a large-scale long-term reengineering of deeper layers, which is practically impossible for hobbyists. You will get hit a lot by people for being not-Unixy (see systemd) and only after years of slog you might be able to show a superior desktop.
On the other hand, there is no money to be made with desktops, so why should a company approach such a risky project?
I believe it helped. Canonical invested in usability and raised the bar in general. Maybe for clarification, I'm thinking about stuff like the Papercuts initiative [0] in 2009.
There is a similar situation with clang and gcc. Clang improved error messages and raised the bar. Gcc follows. It would probably not have improved on its own.
That's only possible if you pay no attention to the hardware you buy. The last time I had to do any post-install config with a linux distro was when I installed kubuntu 5.10 and since Debian 4 onward I never experienced any problem.
Then of course companies like Google are immune to this sort of issue as they even design and sell linux hardware.
Ubuntu doesn't really have timely security updates for most of the packages they ship - those in "universe" etc are only randomly issued security patches, and you easily end up running unpatched stuff if you're not careful. With LTS releases you end up with having years of exposure to unpatched abitrary code execution bugs in security critical programs like firejail.
Because ubuntu is based on Debian, almost all software/drivers packages for ubuntu work on debian.
Using debian could maybe be compared to using vanilla JS instead of the shiny frameworks.
The downside is that, debian is very conservative in their releases. Most packages that ship with the distro or are in the repositories are a bit behind. I guess that's why Google switched to Debian Testing.
Btw even debian testing is comfortably stable.
For people who want to try debian, I advise them to try Linux Mint Debian Edition. It is a vanilla debian shipping with a good looking DE. I installed it on my mother's laptop, she's been using it for more than 2 years. It is so stable that, one time her laptop broke and we pulled her old netbook from storage. I only took the hdd from the old laptop and inserted in the netbook. After installing the wifi driver the machine has been running flawlessly for more than a year now.
I only do dist-update dist-upgrade from time to time, no further maintance was necessary.
I ditched Ubuntu in 2009, my reason was that it was buggy as hell. Usually a new release would fix few bugs and introduce new ones.
Actually even recently I got email that a bug that I was watching was closed because it was too old. I mean I stopped carrying about Ubuntu almost 10 years ago.
I've found that dist-upgrade in Ubuntu introduces lots of breakages in Ubuntu. Was workaround was to reinstall keeping /home untouched. Once though, because of some UI/UX problems with the installer, I ended up formatting most of my /home before I aborted the install. That was the turning point for me. I went back to Debian and haven't moved away since.
Opposite of my experience. Been upgrading from LTS to LTS in production for many years. Non-upgradable OS like Windows and Suse Linux used to warrant new server hardware, but now the servers live far too long since there is no need to migrate.
You said production so I'm assuming you are using server version.
The vast majority of issues I was having were around desktop functionality: connecting a monitor to laptop, weird issues with UI, wifi, putting laptop to sleep. Actually one of last issues that infuriated me was them being ok with release that that crashed (froze) every time you started a laptop with a proximity to 802.11n network.
Imagine trying to use your laptop to take notes in college and it froze few seconds after it booted up repeatedly. It took me a while to find out what the problem really was, then found the bug, realize that it was opened before the release, yet they still went with the release.
To make things even more frustrating at the same time they refused to include OpenOffice 3, because it might not be stable enough. Talk about priorities.
That was the time I started looking at alternatives, someone recommended OpenSuSE and I really liked it.
Although Ubuntu is a glorified copy of Debian, the components that Ubuntu changes tend to be brittle and unstable, and not adequately justified. If anyone wants an OS that helps them get stuff done, not mess with their work, and not even break between major upgrades, Debian is the way to go.