It is probably the most stable common distro ever made. Stability and freedom from licensing are two of the biggest concerns in Debian. Debian *IS* exactly what Ubuntu was based upon, and in turn Mint was made from Ubuntu. But do not mistake that to mean that Debian is not modern.

Debian does have some shortcomings though. It will never have the newest packages. Debian tends to wait until the packages have proven themselves as stable for a while before they leap headlong into it.

And Debian will simply never have some things that are fairly common among other distros. Most of you will not understand why Debian can not play DVDs. It can be made to do so, but only by adding libdvdcss manually, or manually editing the repositories so it can use the same resources of other distros.

So why does Debian lack libdvdcss? Because it is a contested package. Some would go so far as to say it is illegal. I disagree, but it is common enough that you can pull it in from a thousand different sources.

Why is libdvdcss shrouded in this confusion and ambiguity? Because a few jerks decided that they do not want you to be able to play the DVDs you purchased on a system that *Could* have the capacity to rip them as well as play them. Libdvdcss is not in and of itself malicious, but Linux has the idea that you should be able to configure your system to do what you want without the restrictions that others may decide appropriate.

I am far off topic, so I will shut up now. Check out Debian. You may like it more than you would think.

Be well and have fun everyone!