Yup. Ubuntu promises the best of both worlds, and in my experience the end result is noticeably worse than Debian. You notice when things are deliberate and tested versus cobbled together and made to work.

The weird thing is that Ubuntu manages to sit in some unholy local minima.

Debian rock stable, changes slowly and carefully.

Fedora rock stable, changes rapidly and constantly.

Ubuntu is just painful.

Note: this is on the desktop, I just use Debian on the server as the host OS - some habits are hard to break.