16 years ago I wrote about why I like Debian [0]. I recently re-read
it with an eye towards seeing if what I wrote held up today.

The main points I mentioned were the packaging system and the
non-commercial community, and how Debian puts the users first. I
wrote:

    I don't have to worry about the motives of Debian, they tend to
    include features that make for happy users and sysadmins first.

I think this point rings even more true today after the recent Red
Hat (IBM) debacles, first with CentOS and later the RHEL source
code.

The Debian packaging system is still (in my opinion) the best among
the distros as far as usability, but feature-wise dnf and some of
the other packaging systems have caught up to it at this point.

My comment about Ubuntu was way off mark - in 2007 I liked Ubuntu as
a decently up-to-date and stable Debian-based desktop distro, and
for a few years after even a server distro. But I gave up on Ubuntu
as it seemed to lose its way pretty frequently, and I don't regret
that as I read about Ubuntu's move away from Debian packaging and
towards snaps.

My only current reservation about Debian is with the adoption of
systemd, but for desktops I don't think this matters much. For
servers I still prefer systemd-less operating systems - Devuan or
the various BSDs are the path of least resistance here, but it's
also pretty easy to switch init systems on Debian during the install
process [1], so this isn't really an objection anymore.

[0]: gopher://gopher.unixlore.net/0/articles/historical-blog-posts/20071004-comments-on-why-im-staying-with-debian.txt
[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/Init#Changing_the_init_system_-_at_installation_time