Debian was Very Hard some 15 years ago while Ubuntu was rather easy.
These days there's not much in the way of difference on that facet, or at least not enough to tolerate Snap/Wayland/whatever other madness.
Honestly there weren't that many difference. When first ubuntu was released, it just used the experimental debian installer that anyone could download and use from the Debian website. Besides, ubuntu never provided real tools to free users from command line configuration. Since the late 90's the main distros which provided real control panel for nearly everything were Suse/OpenSuse with Yast and Mandrake/Mandriva. Ubuntu has never been easier or more straightforward to use it, it was just a Debian with a default Gnome, some different colors.
The only thing Ubuntu did differently at the time was having a very simple website with a single download button and sending free CDs for free to anyone asking for it which was a big deal when nobody had decent internet connection. Or you'd need to buy magazine offering installation CDs. But the thing is, every single family has an enthusiast cousin, uncle, who in the early 2000's ordereds tenths of CDs from ubuntu for free and gave them out to anyone pulling his hair out of because of an MS windows issue. All that made ubuntu a bit different from Debian like unity, upstart and now snap, only appeared years later after Ubuntu had that reputation of easy distro for beginner.
And this is what really put ubuntu in the limelight and the default goto distro for every new linux user. It was just the most advertised distro, with the simpler website, a general color palette that made it easily recognizable and a nice slogan borrowed from the meaning of its name in Nguni's languages.
It wasn't "just" that. Debian seems to want to be configured out-of-the-box as a secure server, and expects the user to turn it into a usable desktop, which is impossible for novice users and can be time-consuming even for power users. Ubuntu has much more sensible defaults, especially for a novice user. IIRC:
1. Debian's installer is vague about how to install a working system. You have to pick between Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and more, which don't mean anything to a new user. By contrast, Ubuntu's installer contains a single desktop environment, and to use alternative DEs you download a different ISO like Kubuntu or Xubuntu.
2. If you insert a DVD in a Debian PC, by default it's mounted as noexec, preventing you from running any installer on it. Not only that, but when you try to open autorun.sh by double-clicking it in the file manager, it opens in LibreOffice Writer!!! At no point does Debian even try to give a hint to the user what they need to do (not that a novice should be unmounting/remounting). In Ubuntu, you get shown a warning and are asked if you would like to execute the script if you trust it.
3. /bin and /sbin are not in users' PATH, so commands like "reboot" and "shutdown" don't autocomplete unless you edit the environment variables. OK, the terminal isn't for novices, but it's the sort of thing that makes no sense to me.
I didn't spend long using Debian as a desktop but these are the things I remember seeing. I do use it as my server of choice, however.
I agree with most of what you said. But it wasn't just that.
In the mid-2000s, I ordered Ubuntu CDs, my first contact with Linux. The university campus had fast internet, and I could download and try other distros. Mandriva was by far the easiest to set up and use. It had everything included but was also the biggest in size (it required a DVD or 4x CDs if I remember correctly).
I ended up sticking to Ubuntu mainly because the support was better. You could find tutorials for everything you wanted targeting Ubuntu users. Whenever I had issues, I always found answers on forums. Being a total noob in the Ubuntu community was not frowned upon like in the other distros.
Ubuntu also had more up-to-date packages, and updates were coming faster. The UI was nicer in Ubuntu, and everything looked more consistent. Any other distro in that era looked more or less like Windows 98 / 2000. In Ubuntu, Compiz [1] was easy to set up. Compiz blew my mind when I discovered it.
I don't use Linux as my daily driver anymore. I prefer to run Debian on my servers, and I'll like to switch to Arch on my laptop soon. I still consider Ubuntu a distro suitable for someone who starts with Linux.
> I ended up sticking to Ubuntu mainly because the support was better. You could find tutorials for everything you wanted targeting Ubuntu users. Whenever I had issues, I always found answers on forums. Being a total noob in the Ubuntu community was not frowned upon like in the other distros.
I think this was the consequence of the network effect brought by the initial push. The webforums weren't full from the first day.
Exactly. I switched from Ubuntu to Debian somewhere around 2008 and barely noticed any difference. Before Ubuntu I briefly used Mandriva and, indeed, it had all kinds of custom control panels; Ubuntu was very vanilla in comparison.
Sure. I got seamlessly migrated from X as well, when I upgraded my Debian major release. I am not "that kind of hacker" anymore (hence running GNOME), so I was OK with this. Didn't even notice the change for a while.
And keep running software that is 4-5 years old until the maintainers decide that they're ready for a new stable release, unless you use testing and backports? No thanks. I used Debian for years, and I stopped using it out of frustration when I realized that I couldn't install what was available on basically all other distros without risking breaking the system. It's a good choice if you want to run a stable server, it's an awful choice for desktop users.