Ubuntu/Debian have a very nasty habit of breaking the "principle of least astonishment".
Things like why isn't my '/etc/cron.daily/blah.sh' script not running? I'll give you a hint its the period. Good luck realizing that if you come from any other Unix out there.
There is a need for progress but breaking everything just to try something new (pulseaudio, unity, and so on) is not progress just frustration.
That's a bad excuse for breaking standard functionality for no reason at all.
Debian is my primary distro and I still consider it the least evil - but sadly only in contrast to what the others have on offer.
Their mentality to patch and break everything at the slightest opportunity is a big problem. Don't get me started on the mess they make under /etc with all their ass-backwards wrappers for apache configs etc. Motd is not even the tip of the ice-berg here.
Personally I've long stopped relying on anything but the base-install for this reason.
Anything relevant to an application deploy is compiled from source or installed from a custom deb (postgres, nginx, et al). I have better things to do than figure out the latest brainfart of some package-maintainer about how to scatter a postgres-installation across the filesystem...
Things like why isn't my '/etc/cron.daily/blah.sh' script not running? I'll give you a hint its the period. Good luck realizing that if you come from any other Unix out there.
There is a need for progress but breaking everything just to try something new (pulseaudio, unity, and so on) is not progress just frustration.