Yes, apt is the reason to love Debian…. along with its preset (and nicely commented) config files, its style of installing modules etc via directory linkings, its ability to upgrade from one release to another…

Next time you run that set of commands, try:
> apt-get update
> apt-get dist-upgrade
This will update more of your system, since some apps require newer packages and a simple upgrade won’t pull those in automatically…

I don’t want to say x is better than y, I just want to complement the information.

In Fedora you can run “yum update” and then “y” to continue once you see the updates.

Including the fix CVE-2008-0600.

And it also comes with a completely free system. If you want non-free stuff, you’ll need to look for third party repos.

And there are a lot of differences, yes.

After looking for years for a Linux distro that could replace Windows 98/XP for my full-time use, I finally started using Kubuntu in July, 2006, followed quickly by SimplyMEPIS. Mepis held my hand and taught me enough about Linux that I was finally confident and knowledgable enough to install pure Debian this past December, and I’ve been using Debian full-time ever since. I love Debian’s balance of challenge and reward.

For anyone who’s interested in switching to Debian, I carefully documented my entire first Debian install and configuration experience in My Debian Adventure.

except rpm doesnt work as well as APT

debian is both stable and recent enough

You have it the wrong way round.
APT is not a reason to love debian. Apt is available for many distros and there are other package managers which are just as good (although apt was better first!).
Debian is great because of it’s packaging - all of the people that put the effort into making sure that the myriad packages debian distribute work well together and are relatively bug-free.
Apt is a fine tool, but it becomes a great tool only when it is combined with the high-quality packaging work that the debian people do. Debian-based distributions gain from this work and many of these give substantial work back, enriching and enlarging the Debian universe as they do so, but it’s the huge amount of .deb packaging work that provides the base for them to build on.
Debian is the reason you love apt!

After starting out with Slackware in 1994, then being a devout Suse user for 6 or 8 years, i switched to the *buntu family of distros because they’re almost as easy to configure and (most importantly) the apt tools simply kick the living daylights out of any other package management tools i’ve seen. If the apt team will replace the back-end flat-file db with something else (e.g. sqlite3) to speed it up, it will be about as perfect as a piece of software can get.