I started with Ubuntu (when it was left, right and center in my country) but soon gravitated towards Debian. The old packages can be a pain sometimes ( I even tried running Debian Unstable for sometime and ironically that is quite Stable as well) but other things are quite sane.

The distro isn't hard to use (though it does not hand hold like Zorin OS, say) compared to likes of Gentoo or Arch and deb packages are quite common (for third party software).

I ultimately(distro hopped a lot) settled on Void Linux but Debian, IMO, is still slightly easier. The only Achilles' Heel is the woefully sore update cycle since the focus is on stability.