I had a machine (an AMD 3700X with 32 GB of RAM and a fast NVMe SSD) on which I used to run Debian. Then about 2.5 years ago I bought a new one and gave my wife the 3700X: I figured out she'd be more at ease so I installed Ubuntu on it.

I couldn't understand why everything was that slow compared to Debian and didn't want to bother looking into it so...

After a few weeks: got rid of Ubuntu, installed her Debian. A simple "IceWM" WM (I use the tiling "Awesome WM" but that's too radical for my wife) and she loves it.

She basically manages her two SMEs entirely from a browser: Chromium or Firefox (but a fork of Firefox would do too).

It works so well since years now that for her latest hire she asked me to set her with the same config. So she's now got one employee on a Debian machine with the IceWM WM. Other machines are still on Windows but the plan is to only keep one Windows (just in case) and move the other machines to Debian too.

Unattended upgrades, a trivial firewall "everything OUT or IN but related/established allowed" and that's it.

I had used ubuntu back in the day, and when I came back to linux a bit ago I immediately installed it again.

I don't remember all of my frustrations, but I remember having a lot of trouble with snap. Specifically, it really annoyed me that the default install of firefox was the snap version instead of native. I want that to be an opt-in kind of thing. I found that flatpak just worked better anyway.

I almost tried making the switch to arch, but I've been pretty happy running debian sid (unstable) since. The debian installer is just more friendly to me for getting encrypted drives and partitions set up how I want.

It's not for everyone, but I like the structured rolling updates of sid and having access to the debian ecosystem too much to switch to something else at this point.

I use sway with a radeon card for my primary and have a secondary nvidia card for games and AI stuff.

It has its warts, but I love my debian+sway setup