As an outsider, it's not the reliability of the software that is amazing to me. It's the governance and management of the project. The distro has managed to be amazingly consistent and stable for years. But the reason for this is how the project is run. It's hard to do that for so long with minimal drama and they deserve tons for kudos for that effort.
Like some others, where CentOS was my go-to distro, I've started moving over to Debian as my distro of choice when I can. Thus far, I've been very happy with this choice.
Yes! One of the things that stands out to me about Debian is that it is community governed and not underwritten by a specific large corporation. There are a special few huge open source projects that can boast that kind of stable, persistent governance.
I love to tell that, I forgot to check on a Debian server for a year. I also forgot its physical location in our server room (it's one of the many identical servers amongst the racks).
When I remembered its existence, I logged in and it was just doing its thing happily, with all its security updates applied automatically.
You can set up and forget a well set up Debian Stable installation. It'll just truck along without complaining. With a little bit of work, you can make it tell you if it needs any attention but, it's very unlikely.
