Debian is at the heart of the most successful Linux distros
I have been using Debian GNU&#x2F;Linux since 2006.  Debian 3.1 Sarge was the first version I used.  The primary reason for choosing Debian back then was the large number of packages it had in its package repositories.  Its exceptional stability came as a bonus.<p>Over these 17 years, I have used Debian for frontend servers, backend servers, desktop computers, personal laptops, personal virtual machines, team virtual machines, etc.  I run my static HTML websites, Common Lisp web applications, ZNC IRC network bouncer, Exim4 MTA, Matrix-IRC bridging clients, etc. all on Debian.<p>I also spin up fresh new Debian VMs to serve as clean rooms for testing my open source projects and technical guides.  For example, when I published my &quot;Lisp in Vim&quot; article, Debian turned out to be a nice system to quickly install all the necessary packages and test out all the steps in my article thoroughly.  When I write a shell script to be used across a variety of shells, I run my test suite for the script on bash, ksh, zsh, dash, posh, and yash, all of which can be easily installed on Debian.<p>Debian has served me very well for a wide variety of activities ranging from things like software development and testing to personal digital chores like writing documents, presentations, splitting and merging PDFs, editing audio&#x2F;video files, document format conversions, editing photographs, etc. and even having fun, say by raytracing with POV-Ray, running vintage DOS games on DOSBox, or recording live music from my digital piano.  No matter what the nature of the problem is, the solution often begins with a simple &quot;apt-get install&quot; command.<p>In all these years, I have never ever faced any problem with dependency management or package installation in the stable branch.  Yes, the packages can sometimes begin to get old by a few years but the whole system remains outstandingly stable.  It is a great distribution for long running servers.  Debian is also quite good for a lean personal computing environment.  In my opinion, the Debian <i>stable</i> version sets the gold standard for stability in the world of Linux distributions.