Why Debian over the likes of Ubuntu or Fedora, if you don't mind me asking?
RedHat/CentOS are also fairly nice on real hardware, but they seem to be even more conservative than Debian on what they put into the distro and the package manager. That and with the popularity of Ubuntu, just about everyone has a .deb package or even an apt repo for their software. Debian uses the same format.
But I mostly do software development using all of the old, old command line tools, so stability is my priority. With different priorities, one of the other distros may be better.