But The more I personally work with Debian and Debian based distributions the clearer I see the big warts Debian has. They get a lot of credit for their package manager apt which was the best one around for a while but since a few years is just as good or bad as the rest. More here

Debian is solid but I think we need more projects that test other base distributions to try to do something better, to try new things. I recently worked with SkoleLinux which is also called “DebianEdu” and seriously? They didn’t gain a lot by being based on Debian but I have to fight the system pretty much constantly because it feels very “patched together”. SkoleLinux is a really interesting project but I think they lack direction, quality and focus. Many things don’t feel very well thought out and the choice of a base distribution just fits in, it feels like “yeah let’s just take Debian”, not like “we evaluated all the options and Debian is right for us”.