One of the things, for me, was that Debian's releases were confusing. Ubuntu had a clear schedule, aligned to a calendar, with a clear out of life policy.
The second thing was that I couldn't figure out my way from debian.org, to the relevant ISO to download. There's just so many options, scattered explanations, I felt overwhelmed by the site and couldn't figure it out reliably.
The third thing is the out of box experience. Every major Debian descendant has this mentioned in the articles that compare them. Ubuntu is like a refined, user friendly Debian. Mint further polishes Ubuntu. Elementary is designed for newbies and to have excellent OOTB experience. And so on.
Fourth thing, that Debian Stable seems to be behind in version numbers, and Debian Testing seems to be not stable enough. Maybe these are not true, but they haven't inspired confidence in me either.
Fifth, Debian came with some proprietary things off by default, so no WIFI on my laptop, no MP3, bluetooth, other minor inconveniences. I love open source, but I'm not a purist, and I wanted to make use of my computer first, and improve on it later.
After Ubuntu pushing their current in-house bullshit again (snaps this time), and Mint behaving weird on my main computer for some reason (maybe the multiple release upgrades), I took the plunge into Debian after some research, and ended up on using Debian Testing with KDE. So far, the experience has been good, but this really feels like a Linux enthusiast's distro, where I had to look up things on the Internet, because the installed just haven't explained anything - me, with 10+ years of Linux experience, ending up with installing a system that won't boot into the graphical desktop, despite selecting the KDE option in the installer!
The second thing was that I couldn't figure out my way from debian.org, to the relevant ISO to download. There's just so many options, scattered explanations, I felt overwhelmed by the site and couldn't figure it out reliably.
The third thing is the out of box experience. Every major Debian descendant has this mentioned in the articles that compare them. Ubuntu is like a refined, user friendly Debian. Mint further polishes Ubuntu. Elementary is designed for newbies and to have excellent OOTB experience. And so on.
Fourth thing, that Debian Stable seems to be behind in version numbers, and Debian Testing seems to be not stable enough. Maybe these are not true, but they haven't inspired confidence in me either.
Fifth, Debian came with some proprietary things off by default, so no WIFI on my laptop, no MP3, bluetooth, other minor inconveniences. I love open source, but I'm not a purist, and I wanted to make use of my computer first, and improve on it later.
After Ubuntu pushing their current in-house bullshit again (snaps this time), and Mint behaving weird on my main computer for some reason (maybe the multiple release upgrades), I took the plunge into Debian after some research, and ended up on using Debian Testing with KDE. So far, the experience has been good, but this really feels like a Linux enthusiast's distro, where I had to look up things on the Internet, because the installed just haven't explained anything - me, with 10+ years of Linux experience, ending up with installing a system that won't boot into the graphical desktop, despite selecting the KDE option in the installer!