Lars Wirzenius:
Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It’s thirty years old now. To many people, some of its aspects are weird. Most such things have a good reason, but it can be hard to find out what it is. This is an attempt to answer some such questions, without being a detailed history of the project.
I’m personally not a huge fan of Debian, mainly due to the myth that by shipping outdated software it’s somehow more stable than distros that ship up-to-date software. For example, yesterday I saw a post where a person identified a bug in some software only to contact the Debian maintainer and discover a fix had already been applied but it would take a couple of months to make it into an update—this does not sound more stable to me.
Anyway, this post has a good premise of trying to explain why Debian is the way it is and I found that useful.