Debian is a great project I know. But the comment that they only use debian for its principals directly suggests they would use something else if principals were not considered. Suggesting the other distros are better for their uses. Anecdotally I don't think I have ever seen a debian desktop user, and I wouldn't pick it for desktop either because they don't make it easy to get everything working like other distros do where you check a box on install to include the proprietary bits.
I'm a Debian desktop user not because of principles - I use proprietary blobs including Nvidia's drivers - but just because it's what works best of the distros I know.
I've been burned a couple times too many on Ubuntu's regressions. They'll ship a newer version of a package that breaks some use case which isn't super common but not super obscure either, and then I have to figure out what broke. I've stopped trusting Ubuntu's packages so I don't use Mint either even though I like the distro.
Debian continues to impress me with its stability. I run the testing branch at home and breakage is still extremely rare. Yes, there's things that Debian makes harder to set up, and running Debian means you basically resign yourself to running a userspace that's 1+ year old, but the overall experience just works better in my experience.
Maybe I should give Fedora a serious try one day. I haven't properly used any Red Hat based desktop since Mandrake but I did like CentOS a lot for servers.
Have been using Debian as my daily driver for 5+ years on both desktops and laptops. No issues at all though I did spend some time on gnome shell to get it closer to what I prefer (multiple desktops, alt-tab behaviour, etc)
Another Debian desktop user here. Ages ago I tried a lot of different distros, but none of them just stay running like Debian. My computers are for using, not for fixing random errors at inconvenient times.
The installation process, that I have to run when a local disk eventually fails is insignificant compared to constantly fixing shit. (And yes, it's not a nice process - even worse because every time I run it, it changed.)
I use Debian on desktop, because it's the most problem-free distro I've used. Once something works, it usually stays this way with no effort on my part. Ubuntu was the opposite for me, which is weird given how it's a Debian derivative.
I don't care about FOSS, so the principles are not a motivation for me.
I have no idea but it stayed through many staff changes. The university I went to next (U. Bordeaux, ~50k students) 's comp. sci. department computers were also running Debian iirc.
