The first Linux I installed was from a copy of RedHat that my father got for me from the IT department. At the time, it took me a while to set up, because I had no idea why there must be so many partitions, so many settings, so many options of this and that, and had to research each one on a slow internet. I understood about 50% of what I read, and scratched my head through the rest. Not to mention I didn't speak English at the time, so that the number of resources I could read was fairly limited.

When I first heard of Ubuntu, it was said to be quite a bit friendlier to install, so I tried, and pleasantly found the reputation to be true. It felt like someone had endeavored greatly to make my life simpler, including the installation process, the bundled software, and the default look of the DE in general (why I thought so, I couldn't remember). It showed a comically colored progress bar instead of screens of text that scrolled too fast to read. They even made it easy to dual-boot with Windows, without making you go through a whole bunch of partitioning stuff. I thought it was amazing.

Nowadays, I find most mainstream distributions to be friendly enough. Debian, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mint, etc. are all pretty refined. The installers have different interface, but, if you just want to stick to the recommended preferences, it's usually straightforward.

So how does Ubuntu differentiate itself, in 2020?

In terms of the packaging, it's a bit mid of the road, not as stable as Debian/CentOS, not as latest as Fedora, and certainly nowhere near bleeding edge. In terms of DE, Unity is gone. Is it just Snap-enabled be default?