Comment 780 for bug 532633

The difference between Debian and Ubuntu is that Ubuntu makes all the choices for you, so that you don't have to think about them.

The choices made are made by people that know more about the system than most of us do, so they are very likely are very good choices. However, you might dislike some of the choices - they could be suboptimal to you or your environment. In such cases you can go under the bonnet and change stuff yourself. But still - not having to think about all the other possible choices saves your time for more important and interesting things.

If you find that a lot of Ubuntu choices do not look right for you, then Ubuntu might not be optimised for you or your environment and you would find more power and configuration in Debian, but frankly Ubuntu does have all the same knobs as Debian, they are just not as exposed to the unaware users.