> 20 years ago your Linux installation might not include wifi drivers, bluetooth support, decent GPU drivers, fat32/ntfs drivers, or the widely used video/audio codecs of the era.

To be quite fair, this is pretty much the only reason Ubuntu exists. It started off as "Debian for people who just want stuff to work", but these days Debian even ships non-free wifi drivers on the install media. I've personally used both extensively and apart from the "enterprise support" argument and the minor convenience of having ZFS pre-compiled, I see no reason to use Ubuntu.