> If you are just starting out on your Linux journey, save yourself (possibly many) years of varying woe, and go straight to Debian.
Debian is a great OS and still runs on some of my servers! However, what about the release/EOL cycle, which might affect some people's reasoning? Along the lines of: "I'll set this up and I want to keep it running reasonably for X years with unattended-upgrades."
Technically you do have Debian LTS, but it's never mentioned anywhere as prominently like Ubuntu LTS is, which feels a tad odd (because it works fine): https://www.debian.org/lts/
Of course, many looked in the direction of something like CentOS for this, or RHEL, or Rocky Linux or Alma Linux etc., which are supported for around 10 years usually. In my experience, DEB distros play more nicely with most of the software that I want to personally run, though.
The main point I should have included above is that Debian's installation and deployment of any given upstream package is generally better than other distributions (my opinion only, YMMV), especially when there are lots of dependencies.
