Yeah I know that feeling man - we've got a heap of devs and if one of them is complaining about something really silly that you shouldn't have to worry about in 2015 - it's almost always Ubuntu - Ubuntu's who ecosystem seems 'hacky' - where as Debian - We now run on hundreds and hundreds of our servers - it's far more up to date (with Backports) then RHEL based servers, more stable and less 'wtf' than Ubuntu and security updates are released lightning quick - my only gripe with Debian is the lack of decent SELinux policies by default.
Let's start with invasion of your privacy; from gnu.org [1]: "As of October 2012, Ubuntu sends personal data about users' searches [2] to a server belonging to Canonical, which sends back ads to buy things from Amazon."
More at [3].
I don't know if this problem persists, but it's enough for me to choose a distro that never did something like this to begin with.
The good thing of Ubuntu is it's more stable than the other ones I used (Puppy, openSUSE,...), the last time I tried, Ubuntu booted ok with my Pentium 3, 128MB RAM, Intel onboard GPU.
The Ubuntu 8.x to 9.x sucks, but for 10.x and upper, it's cool again, at least, that's a good choice for Linux beginner :D