Ubuntu was a fantastic distribution to start early on. Especially in the pre-10.x days there weren't many beginner friendly ones. Your alternatives were Debian with very outdated software, SuSE which was kind of OK, Fedora which was also quite unstable and lacking packages (remember hunting RPMs on the old RPMfusion?) or Ubuntu. At some point I'd outgrown Ubuntu and moved on to greener pastures. Nowadays I'm not sure I'd be recommending Ubuntu to new users, Fedora is quite good and without all the snap store shenanigans. Even Debian installation experience is not too bad and it's not lacking too much in software.