Best Balance of Excellence in Various Areas of Excellence
Debian reminds me of the world's best bicycle tires for road bikes. You can pick the best tire for racing, or the tire most able to resist puncture, or the tire with the best grip, or the tire that will last the longest, but you cannot have a tire that is top in all those categories, because the features that make the best in one category works against the other. A lightweight racing tire is not going to give the longest wear or be best at resisting puncture. The tire with the best grip does not wear for long. And yet, there is a universally-recognized overall best at balancing these qualities, performing so close to the top in all these categories that for most people most of the time, this one tire is the best tire to use. That tire is the Grand Prix series by Continental, the same company that make Continental tires for automobiles.
Debian is like the Grand Prix tires from Continental. Every Linux distro has a great distinction making it worth the effort to produce. Among Linux distros, you will find a simplest, a most advanced, a best adapted to certain values and purposes, and you will find Debian, not top in any one of these various reasons for various distros, but near enough the top the chances of finding yourself wanting for another distro when using Debian is low.
Highest Quality Bar None
Exception: there is one area where Debian is unparalleled: quality/reliability/error-free performance. In other words, if something is working incorrectly in your computer system, with all its hardware, applications and operating system components, chances of the problem being within Debian are nearer zero than any other software. This is why Debian frequently is noted for its quality. Software quality is hard to measure, but we know it when we see it. The main way we see it in Debian is that Debian does not do the wrong thing. It always works the way it is supposed to. Many high quality software development practices contribute to Debian's quality. Studying how Debian produces this result a good way to learn how to make your own software better. The most important thing to know is wherever Debian is doing something for your system, you can rely on that part of your system working correctly.
I think Debian is one of the greatest things humans have ever done, and it's gaining following and strength. The fact it does this without being the latest appeals to me a lot. I see it as a sign of being rooted in value that matters.
Radio controlled cars come out with new technology all time. Not long ago, a 10-year old car won a world championship race. It beat all the more technologically advanced cars. Or did it? Were the newer cars really more advanced? I don't know, but when it comes to racing all I care is about getting to the finish line first.
There has never been a feature I needed available in some other distro that was not in Debian.
If I had to pick a word to describe Debian..
best
To the best of my knowledge, Debian is the best. Nothing is better except in narrow ways not of interest to me.
I would be thrilled to discover I am mistaken, there is something even better.