This thread makes an interesting read with people's stories. In the spirit of keeping it going, there is an older post from me in this thread from 10 or so years ago which I figured I would add to.
I've used Debian since 2009 (I've ran every version of Debian in some form since Lenny), but I didn't use it continuously through the last 10 years. I actually used no version of Linux from around 2016 to 2019. I sort of got tired of maintaining two OS's on my main desktop around 2015/2016, since 95% of my usage was gaming or music production which needed Windows. I ended up removing Debian from my main desktop given I got to the point that I wasn't using it anymore.
That was up until I got into running my own server at home in the last few years. I tried out Windows Server for a while, and while it worked fine for my needs, it certainly ain't cheap and it isn't the most flexible at times either. I thought about using Unraid for a while given it's not expensive and has a nice UI. However, I went off the idea after a while with things like not being able to run multiple arrays, or it not liking non-Unraid formatted drives, so I then decided I'd venture back into the traditional Linux world.
I thought I'd try out Ubuntu again. So, I installed Ubuntu Server 19.10 on my home server. It ran fine for a few days, but at one point when I got it to run an rsync job copying 10TB of data from an NTFS formatted drive to an EXT4 formatted drive as part of converting from NTFS to EXT4, I came back down the morning after to find my server locked up and unresponsive - I had to force a reboot via the motherboard's IPMI. It brought back memories of the buggy mess that was Ubuntu 9.10 for me.
So, then I decided it was back to my roots - Debian. Well now, I'm running Buster about 7/8 months on my server, and it's been solid. My current uptime as I'm typing is about 6 weeks which is completely ridiculous for me, given I'm constantly tweaking and configuring things.
The machine has also really evolved beyond the media server it started out as. It now runs a whole slew of KVM/Qemu Virtual Machines to do a large variety of stuff. I'm also adding some Docker containers to the mix now too. I'm still undecided about whether I'll run everything in Docker containers or not in the future. My plan from here on out is to go from Stable release to Stable release, but maybe delay the upgrade 2 or so months until after the next Stable release comes out.
CentOS is probably the only other distro I would consider given that's just as stable as Debian's releases, but I'm just too used to Debian to consider moving to another distro for my server now.
So, to sum up - Debian is dependable, reliable, free and it's what I know.
