Would debian had done that 15 years ago, Ubuntu would probably not have existed.
On the other hand, you could boot a perfectly workable system from a live CD (Knoppix) but it was hard to install.
So the motivation was: could we get the best of both worlds? Easy to launch/install and easy to use maintain once installed? This was also more or less coordinated with a huge shift in GNOME development where UX became the main goal and development switched to a 6 months based schedule.
Detecting hardware was part of what was hard with Debian but was not seen the most important part. Having a nice coherent desktop at first boot was the goal.
source : I was part of it.
On my side, I definitly kept ubuntu because that was the only distro that ran on my hardware on first try.
I should not have implied that ubuntu would not have been launched, but rather that the story would have went very differently IMO.
source : I ran Ubuntu Install Party at my local university and, for some laptops, I had to spend hours figuring out what to do. Situation is way better now for hardware (but Ubuntu became too full of bloat for my taste)
And what about the other 400 distributions based on Debian? There are many differences between them not just firmware
https://distrowatch.com/search-mobile.php?ostype=Linux&categ...