Last time I used Debian on an older Dell Inspiron, the wifi wasn't working and making it work meant I had to recompile the kernel. I also tried a Wifi stick and the same thing happened. The drivers weren't open-source and so I was out of luck on both Debian and OpenSuse.

Out of frustration I installed Ubuntu and in Ubuntu my Wifi just worked out of the box. And that's when I switched.

Of course, Ubuntu does make mistakes. Nouveau for instance is better for my old laptop's Geforce and yet Ubuntu still asks me to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers, drivers which have brought me nothing but frustration. But regardless, Ubuntu does have the best hardware support.