Computer Science Department, Pune University, India

We adopted Debian after scanning all the distros available grading them with max. weightage on "Programming Convenience" and "maintainability". Debian "outperformed" all other distros with a great margin.

  1. Programming Convenience: With its abundant packages and its clever interface (apt) it's pretty easy to install a library or search for one. 90% of chances you'll get in the repository. Moreover all the cleverer tools of Programming (IDE, libraries, modules, modes etc.) you'll get in the repository and moreso just an apt-get install <package-name> does it all for you, you are back to coding.
  2. Maintenance: Debian rocks at Package Management. No distro gets even closer to this. We've had nightmares going thru the "rpm" dependencies earlier.

All our server/client machines in the Department run on Debian.