I hope you're prepared for an unforgettable distro! Debian is the undisputed champion of just werks linux distros, the king of stability, the hero everyone needed when Xorg broke on Arch, and *insert more buzzwords and nonsense here*!
Just kidding, DEBIAN SUCKS ASS LOLOLOLOL!!!...or at least thats what the loud xmpp minority always tells me. Is it true though? Probably so, but this writeup doesnt really aim to answer that question because nobody would ever be pleased by that. Linux distro discussions have always been a drag, and I'm not here to tell you why debian is the best or worst distro, nor why you specifically should even bother liking it, rather I want to talk about why I still like and use debian despite its flaws. Think of this writeup as like my personal justification for still using Debian even though BSD or some other linux distro is 100x more based!1 :O
I know people still praise Debian for its stability, and while its easy to dismiss Debian as overrated or not truly stable and point to something thats probably more stable like OpenBSD or whatever, I've never had any serious issues with Debian. That being said, I'd rather not be Mr. "Just werks on my machine". I know people out there have had a terrible experience with Debian, and it seems Debian has its fair share of people who either love it or hate it.
The biggest reason I like Debian and why I've stuck with it for so long is because, to me at least, it is a near perfect balance between convenience and freedom. I can have my desktop and software configured exactly how I want it with very little fuss. Things like using TDE, compiling gtk2 programs, and using the latest version of Psi+ as well as a number of other things I take for granted are so much easier to have set up on Debian than on most other distros. I believe that when it comes to an OS you actually want to daily drive, you should focus on what you want first rather than the extremes of either accepting all undesirable defaults or becoming a diehard tinkerer that must compile everything in an autistically specialized way.
Debian can also do some pretty cool shit people don't seem to know about. It has --no-install-recommends so you have the option to install less bloated binaries if you don't want to compile something. It has preseeding if you want to install Debian the NixOS way (yes, really), and it has a lot of classic software already packaged, which means less time wasted on compiling. It's difficult for me not to like this distro as it has everything I want without too much bloat. I could go on, but I'll let this guy's writeup do the yapping on debian tricks. There are of course some flaws with Debian...
A while back someone sent me this unixdigest writeup talking about how Debian has lost its way. From poor package maintainership to embracing systemd to even going woke, it seems they're right. That's not even discussing the other issues people have with Debian itself like the APT package manager being slow, using glibc instead of musl, and having insecure kernel defaults just to name a few things. Debian has changed for the worse. So then...why do I still use it?
I think I just like the way Debian works and that it has everything I need. I know that sounds like something a coping Windows user would say, but this is about Debian. The great thing about linux is its customizability and modularity. The distro you use really doesn't matter that much, even if its one that kinda sucks. Plus, I'd argue many of the things people have a problem with on Debian are even worse on other distros. Many times I have tried to like BSD and certain other linux distros over Debian and failed. This is NOT to say Debian is the best, but its the one I'm most familiar with and it's still good imo. I actually like that it isnt frequently updated, I like being able to stick with what I know works like xorg, tde, and older toolkits.
There are countless forks of Debian, but the ones I'm most familiar with are Devuan, antiX, LMDE and Q4OS. Devuan and antiX address the systemd problem, LMDE is just Linux Mint but Debian instead of Ubuntu, and Q4OS is Debian with the Trinity desktop. Q4OS is actually the one I use at the time of writing because despite it being based on regular Debian, I really like what they've done with Trinity. It's more than just Debian with Trinity slapped on it. It's basically Linux Mint for boomers and I couldn't be happier a distro like this exists. Maybe some day I will finally use another base of linux or even BSD as my daily driver, but so far I see little to no reason to do so as not only am I pretty comfy where I'm at (and also don't want to go through the effort of distro hopping again), but most of the alternatives seem marginally better at best and vastly inferior at worst. It's going to take a while before I switch from Debian unless they REALLY fuck up their distro and/or I find something that just blows it out of the water while still being able to meet my computing needs.