Do you have any evidence for why confidence in Ubuntu was misplaced before this? Or are you just vibe-accusing?

Best example I can think of is when they shipped an update that they knew would cause corruption on ZFS disks and didn't warn people sufficiently to not update if they were using ZFS. (A warning was buried in the release notes, but such a serious issue should have held back release. Most normal people don't read fifty pages of docs before each update.)

I don't hate Ubuntu at all, but that incident showed a level of blithe carelessness to user data that is unacceptable and reduced my confidence in them.

They closed feature requests to add secure ISO downloads instead of figuring out how to secure their ISO downloads

Unity UI, Ads in the OS, paid subscriptions, etc.

At least 15 years of nonsense.

Wait what, I haven't used Ubuntu in a long time. They have ads like Windows???

They run ads in MOTD IIRC. Haven't used it in 15 years but I've stumbled on a lot of drama over the years.

Apt-get shows you ads for Ubuntu Plus or whatever it's called

Also the "Try minikube" or whatever in the MOTD. Not certain, haven't used ubuntu in a long time

I'd love to try your open-source OS for my server next.

Debian.

Ubuntu should be your last choice.