I've never been crazy about Ubuntu. I have tried several releases and always found it lacking and flawed.

Needless to say, I'm still baffled by its popularity.

But hey! Different strokes. I look forward to trying it again later this year if I get really bored.

ubuntu is easier to get working out of the box, but needs u to learn the different quirks....
i'm using it to try it and its ok...but a lot of stuff i'm use to using i cant do now...
but for a newbie, its good if they dont know but no good if the person telling them is not a ubuntu user...
i prefer any distro as long as it suits the job i want it to do...
horses for courses...and its just another difference...i do like the depository setup and package management tho...
simple and easy...

I personally do not find Ubuntu newbie friendly.

Each version I've tried has left me frustrated.

I have been unable to get the internet connection or printer working.

Mandriva 2006 and PXLinuxOS on the other hand I have successfully got everything working.

My preference is PCLinuxOS 0.92, which I find works and looks good.

Ubuntu does look good, but unfortunately doesn't work for me.

As someone else pointed out. Horses for Courses.

I ran Ubuntu 5.10 on my laptop for a couple of weeks to check it out. The primary differences between it and Debian is that Ubuntu has added better automatic hardware detection/configuration, add some of their own scripts and kernel patches, and basically create a custom distro that while based on Debian is certainly not Debian.

I wouldn't really say one is better than the other. Ubuntu does make for a nice desktop system with newer software and GUI tools, but lacks a bit in stability and has a few bugs yet to be worked out. All in all it's not a bad distro, but I really wouldn't call it a "newbie" distro either. More of an intermediate one as there is still some manual editing and reconfig that needs to be done, just not as much as Debian itself.

How is it easier to get working out of the box? I have never had a problem installing Debian. On my laptop, it never gets the screen resolution correct, but that is an easy one line fix.
What quirks? And if you have to learn them, is it really easier to get working out of the box? Unbuntu has far more bugs than Debian because of some poor patch work to get things to work, which breaks other things. I would much rather have the nice reliable, strongly tested Debian installation, even if it is not as easy to get running out of the box, whatever that means.
I guess Ubuntu inserts the disk in my drive for me, because I really can't see how it could be any easier to install and run Debian.

For users without much experience with Linux, I would say that Ubuntu is a lot easier to install than Debian. There are many options that were removed from the Debian installer, so it runs in express mode without overwhelming the user with detail. This is both good and bad in my opinion. The good thing is that installation is quick and easy. The bad part is that you can't really configure much or pick and choose the packages you want at install time.

From a technical perspective, they are very similar (after all Ubuntu is based on Debian) except that Ubuntu contains many newish packages and a few custom tools. If you are already using Debian and are happy with it, I really don't see the point of switching to Ubuntu. Many people tout it as a newbie friendly distro, but I think this is an exaggeration. There are still many things that need manual configuration and this can be overwhelming for new users. I think many newbies are jumping onto the Ubuntu bandwagon because of the hype and obviously marketing from Canonical (nothing beats fre discs ).