Debian is a non-commercial distribution and reflects the work of a large corps of unpaid volunteer developers (more than a thousand) around the globe. All are committed to the Debian Social Contract and the development effort proceeds in close cooperation with the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation.

Debian is one of the more popular and successful Linux distributions in current use, and it is different in several fundamental ways from other Linux distributions–in its philosophy and in its mode of operation.

It is, by general consensus, the most stable, secure and bug-free of the distributions. Stability results in part from the skill and commitment of the developers, and in part reflects the absence of commercial pressure. New versions are officially released only after they've been thoroughly tested. This is possible because the developers aren't working on a management-imposed release deadline, but rather release when they judge that the new system meets their standards. Quality control for packages in the official distribution is, as a consequence, extraordinarily high. Debian is also one of the larger distributions, making available more than 15,000 software packages–all free and all tested. Perhaps most remarkable of all is the fact that the distribution supports 11 distinct platforms. This too is possible because of its non-commercial basis.

The level of technical support and help available (through mailing-lists, chat rooms etc) is extraordinary.

One of the most distinctive features of the Debian distribution is its sophisticated package-management system, which makes it possible to do even large-scale system upgrades without bringing the system down; users can simply continue working.

The Linguistics Department at UCSC currently runs a network of seven Debian work-stations.

More information (and the distribution itself) can be obtained at the official Debian web-page. A complete mirror of the Debian archive is also maintained at UCSC.