While I found ubuntu’s business practices (all the upsells, mostly) the most grating, really the thing that pushed me off of Ubuntu was packages being behind inexplicably and all the forking/modifying they did to gnome and just always being like 1-2 major versions behind, especially since gnomes been shipping tons of features the last few years and Ubuntu wouldn’t get them for ages.
Outside of the snaps that Ubuntu seems to force you back into if you purposely try to turn it off, its not the worst to avoid otherwise. Or just deal with for a few apps.
If they want the ubuntu stack of tooling, suggest debian. If they feel intimidated by Debian, Ubuntu is fine. Debian is really solid out of the box for a primary devices nowadays. no need to wait for Ubuntu to bless packages since the Debian ppa’s are usually much faster to update. But as long as they aren’t doing really weird stuff, they can always move off of Ubuntu to Debian or any other debian descendant easily if they want a smooth transition since its the same package manager.
As long as the immutable distro paradigm isnt a turn off for them, Vanilla OS is also really neat, including cross-package manager installs. V1 is Ubuntu based, v2 will be Debian based (if it isnt already GA’d… I know thats soonish)
I’ve mostly switched to using Debian for dev containers and servers, and 99% of the time any ubuntu-specific guides are still perfectlh helpful. I moved to Arch for main devices.
(Side note: I abandoned manjaro for similar reasons as I abandoned Ubuntu: too much customization forced upon me, manjaro’s package repo was always behind or even had some broken packages vs the arch repos, and some odd decisions by the maintainers about all sorts of things. EndeavourOS has been just way better as someone who likes to have a less-dictated setup that is closer to the distro base and faster to get package updates)
Edit: I guess my tl:dr is… If one thinks “Ubuntu”, first ask “why not debian?”, and then proceed to Ubuntu if there are some solid reasons to do so for the situation.