Don't feed the troll, etc... But I just had to bite on this bit:

> Alas it's still not suitable as a daily driver for the average home user and probably never will be. It is unfortunate that Ubuntu has to reign supreme in that regard.

It's true that Ubuntu used to be the OOB ready version of Debian, which "just worked", while base Debian took look of fiddling to even have wifi working.

These day though I find the opposite to be true: Ubuntu does lots of weird things I don't want, and I have to "fiddle" to disable all that. A base Debian install however (ISO with firmware bundled), just works.

For me, Ubuntu is officially off my list of distros I bother spending my time on.

Two kids in 4 to 16 range, and two adults in 30 to 46 age ranges have been using Debian on daily basis for almost a decade now. At least three of them are pretty "average home user". There has been forced use of windows (since school and employers wanted), but for home use Debian has always been better due to less maintenance needs and no distractions.

You can install debian and ubuntu with same DE and you'd be hard pressed to find a difference apart from the theme unless you are a power user who knows what snap is.

In fact, Ubuntu has never been an especially user friendly distro. At the beginning it was just a debian that was installed with debian's experimental installer before they decided to use it in stable. Nothing more, nothing less.

If you wanted to find a distro that was making efforts towards beginners looking for Gui config tools, you had to look at Suse and Mandrake (now Mandriva).

The only specific thing Ubuntu did for beginners is sending CDs for free at a time when not everybody had fast internet connections and would look for paper magazine to come with CD/DVD. And they have stopped doing that a loooooong time ago.

> Alas it's still not suitable as a daily driver for the average home user

I think that's fine for Debian. Maybe even a good thing.

Debian supplies a rock solid base for many general purpose tasks. Ubuntu and other distros are free to package that up in a user friendly way, but as a technical user I want to be able to go upstream and get a basic Linux system without extra stuff.

> Alas it's still not suitable as a daily driver for the average home user and probably never will be.

Why not?

My family members need little more than a web browser, media player, and office suite. Debian Stable is very suitable here; arguably more so than other distros, which tend to require maintenance more often.

The installation is slightly easier (but still hard because of USB install) and the website has a more appealing design. Except from that what is better in Ubuntu for the average casual user? Proprietary blobs are now included in the default installer since version 12.