Yes, I know that the ranking is not a good metric of real world use.
Just posting this because MX Linux has been in the number one spot for a long time (2 years perhaps?) and it’s surprising to see some other distro on the top of their site.
It might just be a matter of perspective. I’m not very knowledgeable on distros, so my opinion may come from ignorance:
To me, Ubuntu is too resource intensive with too much going on. Mint seems relatively lean yet modern, with all the basics covered. Debian is a little sparse (no sudo, no fdisk, what’s going on here?).
Who told you you can’t sudo on Debian? ^^ I feel like Debian is flexible enough to give you the system you might want without the bullshit. Ubuntu has lost its way last decade, but you can still debloat it mostly and use one of its alternatives. The Cinnamon DE has improved a lot, but it still feels like Windows Vista to me.
I ended up using NixOS lately so I can have the flexibility, newer packages and very clean repeatable configuration.
I haven’t seen sudo installed by default on debian. Probably the comment is about that. When you start you tend to use only what is already there to not mess things too much.
Sudo is installed on Debian by default, but the default user is not in the sudo group by default. This is intended behavior and is different than Ubuntu or Mint, where the default user created during install is automatically part of the sudo group.
