I love Debian too, but what you described was demonstrably false back when they didn’t include non-free firmware on the installation media. Honestly I think this might be one of the reasons Ubuntu got popular back in the day to begin with, because it was Debian that “just worked”. These days I’m finding it very hard to come up with legitimate reasons to run Ubuntu over Debian.
> I think this might be one of the reasons Ubuntu got popular back in the day
That's absolutely one of the big reasons. I've been a Debian user since slink/potato.
When Ubuntu first came out, it was still heavily Debian rebranded, with some newer packages, and better out-of-the-box driver support. I would some times choose it over Debian because of that. In time, Debian became more compatible and Ubuntu drifted out into what feels like VC-led product development.
It's kind of sad how these days a lot of people default to Ubuntu even though Debian would likely serve them better.
Actually, with the laptop I bought the new installerwas actually kind of more of a pain in the butt. For some reason I could load the live CD fine but if I tried to do a network install I could not get the firmware to load it all. Even on an external USB.
