There are a couple of other things administrators should know about how Debian differs from other distributions before we get into details.
One thing to note is that the home of distribution if you will, can affect the character of distribution. For example, Red Hat was originally developed in the United States and, as such, reflects the common usage and preferences of American administrators. SuSE, on the other hand, originated in Germany, and reflects European practices. A concrete example of this is that, for Red Hat, GNOME is the preferred window manager, while SuSE is more geared towards the KDE desktop manager, although both window managers, as well as others, are available in both distributions. The primary issue is that a distribution that matches your preferences will require fewer configuration changes or software package installations to match your administrative style. Information on a distribution's history and intended purpose can be found on the distribution's home page, and frequently in Wikipedia entries as well.
The Debian project originated in the United States but recruited developers worldwide right from the beginning. Thus, defaults and settings reflect the most common best practices worldwide as much as possible, with individual packages reflecting the interpretation of their developer's particular experience.
The best practice is to select a distribution that best matches your preferences. That way, the default configuration will be closest to what you want and will require less tweaking to match your administrative style.
Next, distributions fall into two main categories: those with corporate sponsorship, and those without it. Corporate sponsorship usually implies that paid support is available, as well as a paid version of the distribution with extra features. This does not mean that it is not available for distributions without such sponsorship, only that one must find third-parties that provide it rather than finding it in one place.
Debian does not have or accept corporate sponsorship, although it does accept and receive a great deal of corporate support in the form of hardware, developer support, and donations. The idea is that Debian is guided by their social contract and their developers, rather than a particular corporate sponsor. Paid support is available from a number of sources (many who have also contributed), and free support from the developers and user community is available via many support pages and forums, as well as an official bug reporting and tracking site.
Another thing that the lack of corporate sponsorship might imply is a lack of structure or direction. This is not the case for Debian. In fact, there is a very strong structure, with supporting processes and administrative responsibilities, guiding Debian development and release. The main impact is more subtle-Debian is guided by a social contract, and a community of developers committed to the idea of quality, free software, widely available, that runs as trouble-free as possible in as many environments as possible.
With that, let's take a look at the Debian Project itself.
