I’ve been using Ubuntu in some form since the first versions in 2004, and mostly sticking with LTS since 2006. What won me over in the early days was the clear versioning story with predictable cadence of releases and support intervals, pragmatic approach to proprietary drivers and video codecs, and the fact that server and desktop were the same distro.

By comparison I never fully understood the Debian versioning story. I have no idea when the next version will become stable, or how stale the versions are in stable, whether I could install it without driver issues on my desktop, etc.

With Ubuntu I could take a break for a few years and know there will be an LTS release in April or 2022, that the previous LTS release was 20.04, and 18.04 was the one before that, etc. That each will be supported for 5 years and so on.