Nah I went over to camp Debian for a long time, switched when Debian Potato was released. Then when Debian kinda stalled I was lured into Ubuntu because they had the latest and greatest. I know it isn't the cool choice these days, but I have stuck with Ubuntu ever since.
Recently tired Ubuntu on my work laptop and it was a surprisingly pleasant experience compared to all the negative things I've heard about Ubuntu. Especially the installer was next level simple.
Yeah I love Ubuntu, it's really fine. But I think because it's easy and for a lot of people their first Linux, it's seen as like the baby version of Linux. So people bitch about it a lot, as if it's somehow inferior to other distros. Like if you don't compile everything from scratch you are somehow not worthy?
Wow! That's really cool, Debian Potato was so hype back then. And every new release was amazing, I had Sarge running for so long. And I had a little home made router with Debian Sarge and an uptime of like 3 years. I had to replace the NIC on it, from a 10mbit coax only to a coax and UTP model because I was switching over to UTP. I didn't want to shutdown the server, so I live swapped the ISA cards, and it actually worked!