Thanks for all of the extensive context.
I’ll bite. Honestly, I’m not overly concerned about the project. Because they are huge and using Debian, they will always fall under immense scrutiny. You get a blend of an utterly massive community project (Debian), along with a powerful corporation working to streamline everything.
Pro’s
- Amazing community support, especially towards noobs. Friendliest Linux community by far, even to users of other Distributions.
- Backwards compatibility. Basically anything you do in Ubuntu applies to Debian,and vice-versa. This makes the documentation even better!
- Company now offers 10 years of security updates through their Pro service in any release.
- Long Term Support builds are extremely stable on production systems.
- They upstream their work back to Debian. Very important.
- Development releases are embracing exciting new technologies, such as OpenZFS and Wayland. It also drove Debian support for Arm64 in switching over from 32-bit images.
Con’s
- Company going to do what company does. Especially in Marketing, Ubuntu is always looking for the next thing. This can be annoying for the occasional obnoxious message in the terminal after an update, but any change they make is also equally easy to disable & remove.
- Snaps. At this point Flatpak seems to have clearly won this race, but arbitrary Snap packaging for tools like Firefox within upgrades has been extremely annoying. Thankfully, it is easy to completely remove and replaces all Snap functionality within Ubuntu. The snap store backend remains closed source, which is silly. Snap performance has been stable for a while now, but many are openly sour towards them due to how they have developed. Continuing to push users towards Snap in the future will continue to push users away from Ubuntu itself. We’ll see how the Long Term Support release this April goes. Fyi, the development release have been amazing.
- Improvements in Debian. It is also worth noting that Debian has been, and continues to be, a massively appealing alternative. The bookworm release of Debian stable has been very well received… and since you can do anything you want in Debian, there is little reason to not switch to it if you are concerned about Ubuntu. This community has honed Debian into a fantastic tool, which no one seems to be complaining about after switching.
Hope this helps.