When I first started Linux years ago I started with Debian and even back then it was great - but like a lot over the years it went for those automated over bloated automated installs. So I switched to Arch. However with the recent Bookworm release it's "Got back to its roots" where you can really install a minimal non bloated system - and it performs just like a "Hound out of Hell" !!!!!
Forget Ubuntu etc -- Debian is well worth a trial these days. I'm running it on a small laptop and it easily runs 2 decent W11 VM's on a 7 year old 8GB RAM laptop concurrently without any problems and with a "theoretically non compliant i5 intel 6th gen CPU".
You guys messing around say with Linux as a VM -- try Debian Bookworm on a Windows host. You won't be disappointed. Ubuntu is the pits these days.
I haven't gotten a handle on who runs Debian yet, I use Linux Mint on a Desktop and a Notebook. I also have Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Kubuntu on bootable LiveUSB Thumb drives, haven't tried Xubuntu yet. Seems all these are based on Debian. Haven't gotten any interest in RPM yet.
Debian is all volunteer based, rather than a dedicated organization that supports it. This page contains the list of the nearly 1,000 people who associated with this project. Debian New Member Process
The current release of Debian is version 11, codenamed bullesye. The version you are on, Bookworm is version 12...which is still in pre-release.
In the rare event that I want to run a linux workstation, i have historically used Ubuntu, and moreso Linux Mint lately. These types of systems I don't typically want minimal, but rather I would like all of the common video stuff and drivers to just work.
For work stuff, I'm all RedHat based systems, RHEL and CentOS (probably moving to Rocky going forward) as well as Amazon Linux for all of the stuff in the cloud.