What didn’t you like about Debian on the desktop? Old software?

I personally use any distro based on the situation.

As others have pointed out, common reasoning behind picking a distro include: hardware requirements, existing ecosystems, end user, package management, configurableness, security, long-term support, ease of learning, driver support, core dev team’s opinions, funding, etc.

I don't remember exactly, it was 6 years ago. I remember the general feeling of having to do too much work to get a usable desktop. Maybe the settings? Keep in mind that I don't need anything fancy. I liked Gnome 2 and I stayed with Gnome Fallback until last year when there were enough Gnome Shell extensions to bend it to what I like a desktop to be.

Maybe Debian is on par now. Old software can be worked around with containers and third party apt repositories. I often do that on Ubuntu too.

Debian has improved greatly in the last six years.

Try it with the xfce or mate flavours.

These days Debian Gnome and default Ubuntu are so similar these days the difference is negligible once you installed 1 or 2 plugins that mimic the Ubuntu functionality. Ubuntu's gnome is just plain gnome with a few in-house extensions made by Canonical - hardly worth it in my opinion while Debian is rock solid. Buster (the current stable) is nearly perfect IMO.