Linux

I've been using it on servers for over 20 years. It's a great distro.

It's a community project. Every member of the Debian project has equal rights and vote on major decisions. It's not owned by a large company so it's mostly avoided any controversy due to bad decisions (for comparison, see the controversy around CentOS Stream).

They mostly don't change things if they work fine as-is. The network configuration in /etc/network/interfaces is essentially the same format as it was 20 years ago. (for comparison, see Ubuntu deciding to change how it does things every few years). Probably the biggest recent change was switching to systemd in 2015, but even today they have a compatibility layer to convert packages with sysvinit-style services to systemd, and you can still switch back to sysvinit and completely get rid of systemd.

You can upgrade to the next version in-place - just edit the apt repository config to point to the next version, apt update, apt full-upgrade, and reboot into new kernel version. Most upgrades are seamless (but it's still best to read the release notes).

Most packages include a README.Debian file in /usr/share/docs somewhere that usually includes very brief instructions on how to get started with the program.

It supports practically every system architecture. They still make an i686 build that works with processors as old as the Pentium 4. They also had an i386 build that worked on systems as old as the original Pentium, and only dropped it this year with Debian 12. Supporting an architecture doesn't just mean the base OS - it also includes most of the packages too.