My main use case for Debian includes numerous applications, ranging from running web applications on AWS EC2 instances using Debian 12, and Debian 12 being the bedrock of Linux Mint, which I run on a personal Mac that is really old. Because of using Linux Mint, it has brought the laptop back to life and it is quick enough to use in a modern way even though the laptop is over a decade old.

I use Debian 12 for building a web application which runs on EC2 instances, and since Debian 12 is free on AWS, I believe it was made to be optimized for EC2 usage. Debian is one of the biggest and oldest Linux distributions, so it is one that came to mind when I was deciding which machine image to run.

Debian is deployed in my organization through the public cloud. I use Debian through the AWS Marketplace, but it is actually used on EC2 instances in AWS, which you would purchase through the EC2 page of the AWS console.

In my opinion, the best features Debian offers include its stability. The stable branch really is stable because once it is configured, I understand you can run it for a very long period of time without needing to reboot or update any of the components. That is really good when you want an application to be extremely stable and not go down, and you are happy using slightly older components. I also value the fact that Debian is open source, so it is free. That is very useful, and it has a big development community that builds it. I understand there are tens of thousands of software libraries which work with Debian from the apt package manager, APT, and also it is very lightweight, which I find to be good as well because that helps with cost savings.

Debian's lightweight design benefits my organization because it does not come with bloatware, minimizing RAM usage. Because of that, we can choose cheaper EC2 instances. You do not have to have as powerful RAM, which makes things cheaper, and also because it does not come with all this bloatware, it also makes it faster. So it is very efficient.

Debian positively impacts my organization by allowing us to utilize a much more lightweight operating system with Amazon EC2 instances, which greatly reduces costs because we can use EC2 instances with lower RAM. Cost savings are good. Debian is very well known across the industry, so different engineers from different teams know how to use it. Using the APT package manager is a common skill for cloud professionals, which makes it good, especially if you are hiring individuals into the company, because at least you would expect they have some type of background using Debian.

I do not know exact measurements, but I would expect we could save at least 10% of costs with EC2 instances just because our memory and CPU requirements would be lower because Debian is lightweight. So it would save cost to some degree.

I do not really think there are any improvements that need to be made. Debian is a very well-known distribution contributed to by tens of thousands of individuals, developers, and engineers, which makes it well optimized. The stable kernel because it is going to be older and naturally stable does not always support brand new components such as CPUs or specialized GPUs out of the box, which can make it difficult to use there. However, that is not much of a problem because Debian has different branches, including the testing and unstable branches.

I have been using Debian for maybe five years.

Debian is highly scalable because we can run it on AWS EC2 instances, so we could have zero or we could have tens of thousands of instances running it if we wanted to.

My experience with customer support is that I use Debian on AWS, and Amazon's enterprise support is amazing. They get back to you extremely quickly and they are highly experienced. I have not needed help from the Debian community for assistance, but I would imagine that would be brilliant because the user community is massive for Debian.

I previously used Ubuntu. The reason for switching to Debian was that I found it a little more lightweight, and the stable branch is extremely stable, which is something I wanted for this particular web website project that I was working on.

It is very difficult to find an exact metric for return on investment because Debian is really a bedrock from which everything else is built upon. However, I would say that using Debian compared to other distributions which have more bloatware would be cheaper because we can run it on less powerful hardware. In terms of cost savings, we might see a cost of at least 10% reduction compared to distributions with more bloatware.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is free to use because Debian is open source, so there is no cost at all.

I did evaluate other options before choosing Debian, but there is nothing more to add.

I did not realize before starting to use Debian that there are different branches, which allows you to choose how stable or how up to date you want it to be. The stable branch, which is what I use, has features that are heavily tested. The software is older, but it does not break often at all because you have to manually update different components if you want them to do so. However, if you did want to use state-of-the-art components, you could consider the unstable version, which I have not personally used, but if I ever did want to do active development for the newest features, then I would be able to do that.

Debian is deployed in my organization through the public cloud. Using the APT package manager is a common skill for cloud professionals, which makes it good, especially if you are hiring individuals into the company, because at least you would expect they have some type of background using Debian.

I rate Debian a 10 because it is extremely stable, lightweight, fast, and open source, so it is free. The only real downsides are that there might be a learning curve because installing it requires a bit more technical experience than Ubuntu, and the hardware compatibility does not always work out of the box with the newest hardware. However, those things are to be expected if you are trying to configure something which is world-class and also highly stable. So I do not really see them as drawbacks; they are more considerations to be aware of.

My advice to others looking into using Debian is that I recommend using the stable branch if they want to make sure their application would be extremely stable, as it is a good way to go. Because it is so lightweight, it is very efficient to run Debian. There is a slight learning curve to it, which might make it a little harder to use than Ubuntu, but if experienced engineers are deploying it, I do not think that is a reason not to use it. I would recommend going for it.