It's literally the universal operating system. I use it on my home server, my rented v servers, my laptop, my desktop computer and on all the servers that I administrate for work.
I'm late to the game, having tried debian for the first time a few weeks ago.
I'm running the aarch64 version (KDE) in a virtual machine on my Mac (M2) and it's the only distro that, out of the box, hardware acceleration is working for video decode of web videos.
All other distro I've tried struggle to display YouTube videos.
With increasing enshittification of so many Linux distros, community distros like Debian are more important than ever. Debian, Arch, Void, Gentoo are so important. I hope more people put some life into Mageia and OpenMandriva. We could use some more alternatives.
It's hard to imagine what the world would be without the likes of Debian.
Not only is Debian a popular Linux distribution itself but it's also the foundation for Ubuntu and so all the rebuilds like Linux Mint and a great many more.
Officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993 with this classic announcement — how time flies huh?
This might make some readers feel old: I was only 5 years old when that announcement was made.
Here's to the next 30 years of a wonderful Linux distribution, may it have many more.
Feel free to get all nostalgic and share your stories in the comments.