Given how other distros stepped up their UX game (with regards to things that are outside the DM/WM combo such as OS install, package management etc), there's no real good excuse for the continued mainstream momentum of Debian/Ubuntu =) Korora (Fedora for newcomers) and Manjaro (Arch for newcomers) seem to install without a hitch these days and largely work fully as expected on most machines "out-of-box". Seem to have come a long way from just a few years ago.
> there's no real good excuse for the continued mainstream momentum of Debian/Ubuntu
Debian's momentum is due to the fact that it's a really stable, really well-thought-out, sysadmin-friendly, production-quality, freedom-respecting, privacy-respecting Linux distro; I don't think that has changed, and I don't think that anything beats them by those metrics.
Ubuntu's momentum is due to the fact that it supports proprietary hardware, is easy to use, and is pretty. You may be right that other distros are better than it there.
