Yup, I jumped around a lot early on, but Debian was home. It's hard to break if you follow the Debian way, and it's definitely stable. I still use it for server and lab stuff, because I can write a doc and come back in 18 months and is still largely reproducible.
I've used a LOT of distros over the years, and Arch is home now (technically Cachy at the moment), but Debian is probably my second favorite. Fedora is 3rd, for user friendly polish.

To be fair, the bezels were huge by today's standards, and one of the main (non-Apple) competitors had a hardware keyboard below the screen. Just think how much more usable these old smaller phones would be, if we had the screen to body ratio of the Pixel 9a.