I get the desire if you want the paid stream. EG, an alternative to Redhat or SuSE as a paid stream.
But if you're going to use Ubuntu, why put up with the snaps, the commercialism, the app store, when you can just use debian?
Every time I hear a reason why, it makes little sense to me. Even though 95% of Ubuntu is Debian, and Ubuntu wouldn't exist without Debian.... people use it.
Ah well.
That's my reason for using Ubuntu instead of Debian - I simply don't care enough to bother with these small things.
Edit: perhaps this situation has improved for Debian now that non-free firmware support isn't hidden, but it's been a while since I installed Debian on a new machine.
Everything would work great, then bam giant updates, everything broken (bluetooth, wifi, video, graphics cards, audio), have to start from scratch learning some new fad Ubuntu folk had invented.
When I want to tinker or try out cool-new-tech, then sure, a platform like Ubuntu is great - semi-stable, half-working software.
When I don't, Debian/CentOS are hands down just better. Sure, I have to configure my bluetooth, but I have to do it just once _and it never breaks_.
Fedora used to be pretty great, then some personalities with inflated opinions of themselves started ruining the relative stability.
Their more clever friends were compiling Arch, but who has time for that?
I say this tongue in cheek, as a personal lived experience.
It also wasn't shy about marketing and made an effort to have a welcoming community whereas other communities were much less friendly to outsiders.
The free CDs and Canonical's "ground game" in the face of the Red Hat Linux diaspora made it much more successful than other "Debian, but easier" efforts before it.
Ubuntu and Debian are pretty similar, and using Debian gets rid of things like snap, which I'm glad to be rid of - but it adds an extra level of "well it works on my machine" which I'm not glad for.
If it's going to be hard to get that special different version of Java to work on the server, it should be hard to get it to work on the desktop too :)
Of course the rise of containers has made a lot of this stuff less relevant.
To me, we've gotten a bit lazy and a bit too focused on the wrong things. I feel like this happened when we started running javascript on the server. That was such a shock to the system and all sorts of things had to be done since it just was not the normal way of doing things. Someone decided it'd just be easier to clone the dev's system and deploy that as a server. Like what the actual... I also totally feel the same way about running a Windows Server. Like why on gawds good earth would you ever think that was a good idea?
For polygot/hybrid cases where you have a smattering of different languages and supporting technologies/services, docker makes a lot of sense.
If you're all in (for example) on nodejs with a monorepo, it probably doesn't - you're just an "npm install" away from deployment.
Whenever I really dig into the docker passion, I usually find devs who are frustrated by having to manage a million little details to get the dev environment going.
If the language/stack takes that pain away, docker loses most of its value.
I still have bad memories of going to the DC with a USB stick with network driver on them because the Dell server with Debian on it would not ship with non proprietary firmware / drivers.
From the firmware wiki at debian.org:
"The Debian project took the decision in October 2022 to create a new repository component non-free-firmware, and include its content on installation media for the upcoming Debian 12 release (bookworm) to make things easier for our users. This change was implemented in time for the bookworm alpha 2 release of debian-installer in February 2023, and all d-i releases and daily and weekly images since then all include firmware."
Previously one had to either download the needed firmware separately, or a bootable image containing it so that it was accessible during install. Many users having problems with proprietary hardware didn't know they could just grab the install image with included firmware at https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in... But I blame Debian for this because their site historically has been excellent at hiding stuff.
Ubuntu = Linux for a lot of people these days, kind of like Red Hat was to us old guys.