If you remember the earliest builds, they included a video of Nelson Mandela explaining ubuntu and implied it as a light, legally unencumbered OS for the world. I was helping build labs in East Africa at the time, and it was a fantastic choice for running scientific operations because of its relative UI cohesion and simplicity over Debian while allowing access to its vast repositories and package groups.

I kind of lost all faith when the power trips started happening across the GNOME Foundation and elsewhere and moved to less divisively ambitious distros that were more responsive to their users.

I've never had issues installing or using Linux on hardware I picked, but I understand the struggles of working around non-spec and proprietary chipsets without drivers. I don't use non-free drivers in most cases, so having hardware that doesn't struggle with them is paramount.