I bought a laptop in a pawnshop about five months ago, and I tried Linux Mint, Ubuntu fedora, Manjaro, and another arch distribution I can’t remember, and they were all just a big clunky pain in the butt.
And then there was Debian. It’s been running flawlessly for four months. All function over flash. I don’t need to worry about snap or flatpak or configurations that caused me to have to search the Internet for hours.
Love it.
That's absolutely one of the big reasons. I've been a Debian user since slink/potato.
When Ubuntu first came out, it was still heavily Debian rebranded, with some newer packages, and better out-of-the-box driver support. I would some times choose it over Debian because of that. In time, Debian became more compatible and Ubuntu drifted out into what feels like VC-led product development.
It's kind of sad how these days a lot of people default to Ubuntu even though Debian would likely serve them better.