Samuel Henrique:
Every two years Debian releases a new major version of its Stable series, meaning the differences between consecutive Debian Stable releases represent two years of new developments both in Debian as an organization and its native packages, but also in all other packages which are also shipped by other distributions (which are getting into this new Stable release).
If you're not paying close attention to everything that's going on all the time in the Linux world, you miss a lot of the nice new features and tools. It's common for people to only realize there's a cool new trick available only years after it was first introduced.
Given these considerations, the tips that I'm describing will eventually be available in whatever other distribution you use, be it because it's a Debian derivative or because it just got the same feature from the upstream project.
I'm not going to list "passive" features (as good as they can be), the focus here is on new features that might change how you configure and use your machine, with a mix between productivity and performance.