Known for being consistent in maintaining a highly secure system. Several other popular distros use Debian as a base or core for their own Linux OS, the security being one of the main factors why it's so commonly used.

Guaranteed commitment to adherence to values, principles, priorities, requirements and guidelines by the Debian project.

Unlike other distributions that just extract their Live image, Debian offers a real traditional and modular installer to customize the installation.

Once installed you can almost forget about it and start to use your desktop for your daily tasks.

Almost any software that is available for Linux provides a Debian package.

Depending how it is configured debconf does the most of the hard work for you and only asks you with configuration /file conflicts.

Debian runs standard Gnome, XFCE, KDE - it doesn't use its own special desktop environment, which means that users benefit from the work of the whole Linux community, Debian developers can focus on the distribution itself, and any support for your desktop environment on other distributions should work on Debian as well.

But has quite a few bugs from 2016-2017, apparently for long term.

If you haven't used Linux for a long time, say 5-10 years, it's a great distro in which you can quickly get in the boat again. You don't have to worry about falling back. Everything is in its place.

It is possible to rebuild the entire system and optimize it for your hardware (of course it is not detailed as Gentoo's USE flags).

Debian has a Stable branch, where packages are thoroughly tested before release. Furthermore Debian is know to be the definition of stable when it comes to production systems.

You don't have to disable SecureBoot if you use it, which is useful for LiveUSB or dualboot setups.

Debian is one of the few distros that let the user choose if he wants a free system or not.

Every Debian Release can either use a Rolling or Release based model.

Debian has the widest choice of hardware platforms, including:
amd64, armel, armhf, i386, ia64, kfreebsd-i386, kfreebsd-amd64, mips, mipsel, powerpc, sparc, s390, s390x, source, multi-arch.

You can either use aptitude, apt or apt-build to install software from the Debian package archives.

As Debian is the base for SteamOS and because Ubuntu is based on it, it's almost certain that all Linux games will run properly and require no hacks like creating symbolic links because of some hardcoded paths.

Debian is one of the few distros that let the user choose if he wants a free system or not.

The most Linux distros have one or two stages before a release, but Debian has five before a new stable version is released (experimental > unstable > testing > code-freeze/bug hunting > stable).

Debian supports almost any Kernel maintained CPU instructions set. It has also a few non Linux Ports.

Because of its popularity, Debian has a lot of applications available which range from productivity programs to business software, games and development tools. It comes with over 55.500 packages (software that is precompiled and ready to be installed on a local machine) -- all of them for free.

Debs are normal ar and tar archives with shell scripting and additional gz, bz, lzma or xz compression.

The Debian installer can still be launched as text/curses-like installer which is more compatible and keyboard-friendly than the graphical version.

The Debian project is the biggest open source project with over 5000 active contributors.

The developer works very well, so the code is one of the best written out there.

Debian releases live install images for CDs, DVDs and USB thumb drives, for the i386 and amd64 architectures, and with a choice of desktop environments. These Debian Live images allow the user to boot from a removable media and run Debian without affecting the contents of their computer.

Debian is one of the oldest and most popular distros out there. Debian's popularity means that you will always be able to find a solution for your problem just by searching on Google, or if by chance nobody has had the problem you are having it's very easy to ask the community and quickly get a solution.

Debian offers stable and testing CD images specifically built for GNOME (the default), KDE Plasma Workspaces, Xfce and LXDE. Less common window managers such as Enlightenment, Openbox, Fluxbox, GNUstep, IceWM, Window Maker and others can also be installed.