But that's the whole reason I'm using Ubuntu in the first place: sensible defaults. There are plenty of other great distros out there and switching is easy, especially to such a close relative of Ubuntu like Debian.

Too much user-friendly cruft in Ubuntu now. Debian keeps the good parts and doesn't make me do extra work disabling the WM and friends. XMonad >>= that was easy.

well, i did change from debian to ubuntu just because of the hardware drivers being there by default. So it's just logical.