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Debian Is the Most Important Linux
inkscapee writes "Without Debian we are nothing. Debian is the most influential and important Linux, and is unique for being the largest, oldest, 100% non-commercial community-driven distro. '...just under 63% of all distributions now being developed come ultimately from Debian. By comparison, 50 (15%) are based on Fedora or Red Hat, 28 (9%) on Slackware, and 12 (4%) on Gentoo.'"
10 or 12 years ago, maybe (yes, MAYBE) the statement "Debian is the most important Linux" may have been true. At that time it was definitely influential and all the cool kids used it and thought users of other distros just hadn't seen the light. Even then it was mostly bravado and some kind of elitism -- I did ask many Debian users back then just why it was so much better compared to other distros and the almost invariable response was "it just is"; yeah... very informative. Honestly, their responses were almost always a load of crap. At several "install fests" the Debian guys were there touting how much better Debian was, but the impression I got was that they thought it was better because of dkpg; after the actual operating system was installed it was basically the same as any other distro. But, the ncurses based dkpg seemed to be the pinnacle of success.
Fast forward to now. Stable releases are so infrequent that the distro may as well be dead. Development seems to have halted and when a "release" is forthcoming it's hardly stable or "complete". Yes, I will have fond memories of Debian, but I think they will remain in the past.