My own Debian install has run continuously for about four years now, with incremental upgrades to the hardware and dselect to upgrade the software (I run apt off a cron job now - which makes me lazier than lazy). I actually use Debian's unstable tree rather than stable to no ill effect; the last time I had a major problem with it was about two years ago, but even that was resolved inside a couple of hours.
About six months ago (so this should be with the current Debian version) I installed Debian on a friend's computer. The install is still clunky, but it's ten times better than when I was using dselect (the original debian package management tool) and about a hundred times better than Sun's package tools for Solaris.
My evaluation of Debian is that Debian makes it very easy to get an maintain a working server but less easy to get a working workstation. Red Hat probably has the edge in that respect, but I wouldn't want to maintain a server using Red Hat or SuSE; they just don't have the mechanisms for package quality assurance/quality control that Debian has. But I wouldn't recommend Debian for Joe User's first Linux box, either.
Marco
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> Marco Anglesio | People demand freedom of speech <
> mpa at the-wire.com | to make up for the freedom of <
> http://www.the-wire.com/~mpa | thought which they avoid. <
> | --Soren Kierkegaard <
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