I moved to Linux last year (my T430s was unbearable with Windows, but turns out still great with Linux). Briefly tried some Arch distros (which felt like a time black hole I don't care for) and Ubuntu before settling for Debian. Partly because it seems like a pretty "pure"/minimalistic OS, because I figured it's a good OS for servers too so might as well get familiar with it and because I wanted to run i3 so wanted to avoid the "bloat" from Ubuntu (which I now realize is negligeable).

While it's been serving me well, it still feels quirky and a lot of hardware stuff just didn't work out of the box so I've accumulated a fair few hacks and I dread having to butt my head against those again when this laptop inevitably craps out. Sometimes it's just finding the package you need but I also had to do a lot googling and changing speficic lines from specific config files for a bunch of things. Namely my volume buttons, mute button, Bluetooth, Bluetooth devices, recorder, brightness buttons and others I forget. My volume buttons still don't work if it's through a Bluetooth device but I'm just putting up with it cause I couldn't find an answer fast enough and on a new connect I have to explicitly go in pavucontrol (or whichever it was, "firefox no sound bluetooth debian" is seared in my search history). I never managed to get the Steam for Linux thing working and when I try again it seems to clash with the remnants of some old attempt.

Maybe I just don't have enough experience and it would be the same on any Debian or Linux distro but AFAIK Ubuntu does much better at handling drivers out of the box.

I like the simplicity of it at face value but I'm not sure why I wouldn't go with Ubuntu next time to avoid the hassles or if I'm not being stubborn by not going for Windows with WSL (assuming I don't buy another old horse). Worst is I still need to run a Windows VM in it when I'm compiling something to .exe or some specific Windows only software.