That’s not what I said. I didn’t claim that Ubuntu invented the idea of a software store. I just said that they add a lot of value to Debian. So Ubuntu’s existence is perfectly justified. And replicating their setup takes time. Especially how their gnome is set up. i have a script that turns vanilla Gnome on any distro into one that looks like Ubuntu’s, so I know.

Is Linux Mint useless as well? It just preconfigures Debian/Ubuntu to be more user friendly. Anyone can do that on their own.