I've been using GNU/Linux for quite a few years now and have been a long time Slackware Linux user although I have played around with a lot of other distributions. I had experimented with Debian Linux a few years ago and wasn't at all impressed with it. It was sluggish and simply didn't run as fast as I wanted my OS to run.
As I had some time to kill today I decided to check out Debian in it's current state. I have to say that I am impressed with how much it has improved. It runs very nicely on my laptop, is very responsive, and is very easy on the resources. This combined with the apt package manager system that has made Debian such a popular base for distributions like Ubuntu and Mepis, makes Debian a pretty nice OS.
In just about an hour I had the OS installed, all of my hardware configured (including the pesky cellular PC card that wasn't designed to run in Linux), and a nice 3D desktop in place. I've spent a few hours playing around with it, installing additional software, and just generally seeing how it does with the things that I need for it to do.
I like the fact that isn't isn't "dumbed down" as distros like Ubuntu tend to be. Nothing wrong with that for some people. Many just want it to run without much manual intervention from them, but I prefer to have a bit more control over my system (the reason I've run Slackware for so many years).
The apt package manager system makes installing software a snap in Debian and it's derivatives. You can either use it on the command line or use a GUI like Synaptic. You simply tell it what you want to install, it downloads it from the servers, along with any dependencies that are required, and then installs and configures the software. Pretty simple. And there are over 20,000 applications available so it's not hard to find something that will do the job you need.
All in all I'd say that Debian has come a long way in making their OS both usable and responsive. I think I'll keep it a while.