I advocated for Ubuntu for years because it was easier to install and had excellent hardware support. For 2026 I have switched back to Debian because Ubuntu has been making my life more difficult. Ubuntu 26 basically forces you onto Wayland even though it breaks some of my use cases, particularly with screen recording. It turns everything into Snaps which is a hassle because it means I need to mirror both the regular repo and the snaps to my closed network instead of just the repo.

Ubuntu still has the superior installer by a good margin, but it does sometimes like to crash when run offline. Debian's installer at least has the option to go text only. There is also more work to do after the install is finished on Debian, but since that's a script it's not such a big deal.

The one bit of the Debian installer I dislike the most is how if you aren't online when you do the install you get a completely empty sources.list, and the Debian sources are a lot more complicated than Ubuntu's. Debian's support for third party drivers like nVidia graphics is also more complicated and confusing than Ubuntu's.