Non meme replies if possible, legit curious about this...

The better question would ask why people use Ubuntu over Fedora when they have the same hardware compatibility but Fedora came first.

dpkg

Because Debian has ancient packages even at the testing branch and its up-to-date packages are "unstable".

In the tech world, things are popular because of marketing, not because of quality.

But dpkg is shit

Because Ubuntu is more polished for the end-user.
Just go ahead and compare the font rendering on both.

Because Debian is slightly more of a hassle to install and enable the non-free repos. Ubuntu also works some custom things into their kernels. Other than that, there really isn't much difference. In fact, most Linux distros aren't really all that different. A neat example of this is a script I used to use that would install a fully functioning Arch desktop over a Ubuntu netinstall.

i don't understand why you guys can't use google.
one is a community project and one is a corporate effort with marketing and commercial support.

Huge marketing and a money losing strategy that lasted years but gained a lot of hype. Many in my circles fell for the mailed "Free CDs". It first appeared when Debian had its longest struggle to release a stable release, which took close to 3 years after the previous stable release. It was in this release, that the new debian installer made its first appearance. I got to know it in the next release, Etch, when I first got into Debian and I found it extremely easy to install (for someone with computer experience). The notion that Debian was difficult to install was no more.

What do you mean use google? The hardware or the software?

Regardless of which one you mean, both of the following complaints still hold up:
>botnet
>not suitable for any kind of involved task

To elaborate on software, despite its gentoo lineage, chrome OS is pretty much just desktop android, it provides nothing useful for development or related tasks, and instead expects everyone to use it the way an end user would. It allows for browsing, streaming, office work, multimedia work in a limited capacity, and gaming in an even more limited capacity. Any task that doesn't fall into those categories is pretty much out of the question, with the exception of virtualization -- which technically allows you to do any of the other tasks, but comes with its own obvious disadvantages -- and replacing the OS completely, which is possible, but A) more difficult than it should be, and B) defeats the purpose of this part of the argument, since right now, I'm talking about the drawbacks of chrome OS, not the drawbacks of the chromebook. Finally, though it should go without saying, chrome OS is nose-deep in google botnet integration.

To elaborate on hardware, chromebooks have google backdoors and spykits built into the hardware, and also said hardware isn't powerful enough to do more than the aforementioned rudimentary tasks natively supported by chrome OS. So even if you wipe the chromebook and stick bare metal gentoo on it, it will be a clunky, crashy, and overall very uncomfortable bare metal gentoo, and also, you won't even be out of the botnet woods anyway, because google is still using your official google hardware to watch you use gentoo.

basically bloated loonix for chads

i'm talking about the search engine you sperg
as in, you could've searched the stupid question and found an answer without murdering an innocent thread for it