I was a big fan of Ubuntu in the beginning. I liked Debian in principle, but hated having to choose between the “stable” and “testing” branches, the former of which was literally years out of date, while the latter was too unstable for my taste (leading me to dub the choice “stale” or “broken”). Ubuntu at the time seemed to strike a happy medium: a reasonably well-tested 6-month snapshot of Debian “testing”. As far as I recall, my only real complaint in the early days was that its color scheme had been decided upon by someone we can only assume was legally blind. Turd brown with safety orange highlights: no sighted person’s first choice.
