People mostly seem to like KDE Plasma more than GNOME, but Ubuntu still seems way more popular. Will Kubuntu ever overtake Ubuntu? Will people ever default to saying Kubuntu instead of saying Ubuntu even when speaking generally about *buntus?
Same questions for other distros like Fedora/Fedora KDE
Usually it is about the attack surface where more (unnecessary) stuff is running/enabled, the bigger the surface is. Ideally you want as small as possible surface, Alpine is perhaps better in that.
Reducing the attack surface with Gentoo … (I see myself out)
Actually, I use Debian stable on servers by default, only when clients request Ubuntu, I help them admin it. I would never pick Ubuntu for the desktop. Debian and Fedora do a better job being closer to upstream. And: there are snaps which I want to avoid on the desktop.