Nope, not just you. I've tried Ubuntu a few times, but it's consistently been unstable (once requiring a complete wipe and reinstall when upgrading to a new version failed).

To be fair, Ubuntu (or to be precise, Xubuntu in my default case) was doing the job for me up until 15.10. There is also a rather comprehensive Wiki that solves a lot of the performance problems with a tutorial that can be done once (and takes about 10-15 minutes to complete). Some of that also applies to Debian. It just is not the default set of settings for a reason that I can't fathom.

In the end, all distributions have some problems. In terms of the Debian-derived ones:

- Canonical did some shitty stuff with Ubuntu (Amazon, forcing Unity, recent and mentioned above 'fuck you' to people with AMD hardware) and only recently made it inactive by default (but to my knowledge it is still within Unity)

- Mint ISO repositories got hacked (more info here) so for sake of security you might want to wait for a day or two after downloading ISO from site. Bit shit if you want to install it right after download.

- Bunsenlabs (successor of CrunchBang Linux) left me with an impression of being just Debian with preconfigured OpenBox window manager. Following 'review' comes with a caveat that I have used Bunsenlabs for less than a month to see what's the hubbub about. It carries a version problem from the opposite end of Debian normal repositories. Instead of being on the safe and stable side it goes the Arch way and uses some of the cutting-edge/experimental versions. It's not impossible to work and have a fairly stable system out of it, but when something crashes you might get boned and a lot of the Debian/Ubuntu support will be outdated for you. As was in my case when I have plugged my USB camera into it and system went full retard on me.