Also, why did you people choose to use debian? Is it just better than other distributions?I don't know, I have never used anything else (besides short adventures with Gentoo and Ubuntu and a few more live CDs).
I switched from Gentoo to Debian on my laptop 6 months ago. I used Gentoo (and I'm still using it on servers) for many years. I learned a lot about GNU/Linux this way. I liked to test the latest software releases, choose the dependencies in really need, test some unusual compilation flags, etc.
Now that I'm a bit older, I don't want to spend so much time in setting up my system. I want something that works (quite) out of the box. Moreover, compiling every single piece of software is a time-consuming task. So I wanted to try something else. One of my friend is a Debian maintainer and it convinced me to give it a try.
I'm quite happy with my Debian unstable. I have a 6 months old laptop so I had few problems at the beginning with bad hardware support. But now, everything is working as I want to. I regret that some software takes a long time to come into unstable/experimental (e.g. Gnome development release). And I find that it is easier to create Gentoo's ebuilds than Debian's packages. But I still have to learn a lot about Debian.
I'm using Ubuntu at work and on my girlfriend's laptop. This is probably one of the best desktop distribution I think. And I don't see so much differences compared to Debian. The only reason for me not to use Ubuntu is, as you said,
It seems like you people are elite linux users,
I don't want to use the same distribution as my girlfriend or a distribution that my mother could install herself :D
I still haven't found a distribution that makes me 100% happy. But I'm really happy with Debian at the moment.
In a way, Debian offers more choices and doesn't force anything on you which you don't strictly need. On the other hand this means you have to make more choices yourself which is hard if you don't understand your options in the first place.
Gentoo offers even more choices. So if you have time and want to learn more about a GNU/Linux system, give Gentoo a try. Moreover, the forums and the documentation are awesome.
Regards, Cyril Jaquier