More than a decade ago a programmer friend got Ubuntu running on a second hand desktop for a rather computer illiterate arts & letters student. He was able to navigate the GUI like any other system, and it had Firefox, OpenOffice, and mplayer. I knew then that Linux is a perfectly fine desktop OS. And now we're back to using Debian of a sort. ;-)
I stopped using Debian when its ridiculous "free" purely ideological approach to software actually caused me issues.
I needed to install Debian on a relatively old laptop a few years ago. It had all "mainstream" hardware. It's WiFi adapter was an Intel one (and a very common/popular one at the time), but it was one that wasn't open source.
How did Debian approach this? It's installer gave me a not very subtle passive aggressive message telling me that although they have the drivers for the device, it was not going to install them... because the ISO did not include them. With no working WiFi, it of course could not connect to the internet to download them! Worse still, turns out that even if it had connected to the internet it wouldn't have downloaded and installed them anyway. I found this out because I managed to use an Ethernet connection.
Completely stupid and frustrating and it felt like I was being blamed as if it was my fault.
Installed Ubuntu, included the drivers, connected to WiFi during the installation.
I have not used Debian on anything since.
They do provide "nonfree" install media which include firmware blobs that many people need to get their wifi up - https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in.... But it's not easy to get there (I google "Debian nonfree") and it has "unofficial" in the URL which I imagine doesn't help things either.
I understand that Ubuntu is meant to be the user-friendly Debian-based distro and that Debian is meant to be Free Software first and foremost. I just wish that this nonfree install image was a bit more official and easier for users to discover.
edit: oops, I should refresh before hitting "reply" I didn't see the other answer
So the "firmware" I required for my Thinkpad's wifi to work (and which was included in that Debian nonfree image) is this: https://wiki.debian.org/iwlwifi
update: actually on that Debian wiki there's a page called "Firmware" which explains things well https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware
I like it that that try to focus on a completely free version, as that is what they stand for and why a lot of people respect them, while at the same time being realistic about the real world problems that people face.
And Debian is great. We might take it for granted now, but 2 decades ago while everyone else was fiddling with their own package dependencies with RPM (pre-Yum) Debian had amazing package management with builds for all sorts of amazing architectures. They were leaders both in thought and execution.
I tried (but failed) to influence an employer to invest more in Debian; instead they went with SuSe which eventually caused a few small problems. Now Debian & Ubuntu are booming.
It was interesting because the cause was a patch crafted to satisfy a static analysis tool they insisted on applying to every package, which demonstrated their want to go above and beyond with respect to quality. Kudos to Debian in that regard. But a blindly applied policy, and bad judgement in disabling some cryptographic initialization code, caused a terrible bug.
I wonder if this is less of an issue today because of well defined kernel interfaces for getting "good" random numbers (i.e. cryptographically suitable). I'm sure the devil is in the details, and OpenSSH's support for unpopular systems means intentional use of uninitialized variables is still in the code base. It's all very impressive to an outsider who knows enough not to tell cryptographers how to do their job.