The following answers were particularly applicable at the time Ubuntu came onto the scene.<p>&gt; What was so bad about Debian ?<p>1) Unpredictable upgrade cycles. 2)Packages in stable were a bit on the ancient side. Ubuntu LTS is awesome (other projects like Firefox have since copied the fixed release cycle)<p>&gt; If you don&#x27;t like Debian Why not give a a bsd a try<p>Because BSD had (has?) poorer driver support for consumer products (like on my dev laptop)<p>I don&#x27;t care much for Canonical and some of their other projects (Unity desktop, Ubuntu One), but Ubuntu as a project is pretty kick-ass. Ubuntu stepped into desktop linux in a big way as other Linux vendors abandoned ship (see RHEL)