linuxmemes

Usual sentiment of "the best distro is the one that works for you". I can just say that I found Ubuntu to do a confusing "splitting the difference". It requires more knowledge than using, say, windows, but also tries to hand hold. I put in a lot of time with Raspbian, and now Debian on a desktop, and I like it better because there's less "in-between".

I'd kind of stumble through windows, sort of getting what was going on but mostly having faith and a hands off approach to what was going on underneath the hood. I didn't really understand or learn much other than keyword recognition and a passing concept of broad principles. Rasbian and then Debian forced and encouraged me to get under the hood more, so when I was troubleshooting I was at least learning why things weren't working. When I had display issues, it wasn't "I clicked the wrong box" it was "because of my SSD my kernel has a race condition with the video driver and x". Not that I would, but I get now how you can slim down an OS for a specific hardware platform if you really wanted. Having done a ton of microcontroller stuff where I was getting different chips and whatnot talking to each other succesfully, this was a HUGE missing piece. "Real computers" aren't a black box mystery to me anymore, even if I'd suck at proper computer engineering.

Ubuntu kind of over optimized so I didn't learn, but was being asked to do more under the hood anyway. I kept looking at it as adjusting settings the way I did with windows, even though it was asking more of me in terms of understanding to troubleshoot.

But again, that's me and my experience, and more so it's based off of how I personally learn. I'm still not overly familiar with Ubuntu, but I get now that there's no reason you can't do what I described above, it just never "clicked" for me.