alt Hacker NewsI have used Debian starting sometime around slink. I still type "apt-get ..." and it still works reasonably well. There have definitely been hiccups in upgrades over the last 25+ years but the amount of time/effort dealing with those is almost nothing in comparison to other linux and non-OSS systems I've dealt with over the same span of time. My only regret is not contributing more to the community.
The thing I like most about Debian is that you need to know at least a little about what is going on to use it. For me, it does a good job of following "as simple as possible and no simpler."
Which one was slink?
My first Debian install was in 1996. I had no real idea what I was doing, but it was amazing to me that I could remote-display windows from machines across campus, and it was alien compared to the windows 3.x/95 I was used to at that point. There was no apt at that point, or none that I was aware of, and adding new stuff was painful.
I started using debian preferentially as my workstation/desktop OS in about 2005, and was installing it on embedded systems (linksys nslu2) to make micro servers by … etch I think it was.
By 2008 I was at IBM and they allowed a choice of windows or redhat on your laptop, and if you were adventurous there was experimental support for Ubuntu which might work on Debian. I made it work and discovered that among 330k people there were 22 of us running it!
Always loved it, it always just made more sense than other distros somehow. My daily driver is a Mac now, but I still have a few Debian machines around.