I’ve seen people suggest Ubuntu without mentioning Kubuntu, but it seems like most people (especially gamers?) prefer KDE Plasma. I’ve seen people complain about Ubuntu’s GUI and lack of customization, but then no one suggests them to try Kubuntu instead. It seems like people just don’t know that Kubuntu exists.
Also as an aside, people often criticize how slow updates are on Ubuntu/Kubuntu/etc, but if you enable the backports ppa then it’s actually pretty quick!
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
Fiddle with the Terminal to add a PPA (and also Flatpak) just screams usability.
You can add Flathub in Discover without using terminal
Backports aren’t necessary, but it’s nice to have the option if you later decide you want something newer
Still not user friendly. Bazzite (and others) has this out of the box.
First enable Flatpak, then add the Flathub repository, and then add a few PPAs here and there just is not user friendly at all, Terminal or not. This is the Linux Gaming community. The likelihood that people here want the emulators that get published on Flathub because of Steam Deck is high.
They are necessary because of Canonical’s insane demands for version number freezes. Unpaid volunteers often don’t have the resources to cherry pick and backport individual bug fixes. When the Kubuntu maintainers were blogging more frequently, “add our PPA to get bugfix xyz” was a recurring line.
I don’t have an Ubuntu machine at hand but I’m almost 100 % sure (because I used it in the past) that you can manage repositories via GUI and activate backports by simply activating a checkbox.
Very slightly less of a usability nightmare, especially for beginners who cannot be expected to know this stuff, especially when actually user friendly distributions take these troubles off the user’s hands.