I'm getting the picture that Debian for the bbb is kind of bare bones, no pun intended. Is that right?

I mean, I wouldn't say that.

Debian has various "sets" of packages that you can install, and you can omit things like a desktop environment if you want. It doesn't have a particularly small package repository.

There are "small" distros out there. OpenWRT targets consumer broadband routers, which have limited memory and storage capacity, for example.

If you want a way to characterize Debian...hmm.

Well, l'd say that they've got more of an ideological free-software bent than most distros, require users to enable non-free repos.

Debian is notable for being, in 2024, the biggest "parent" distro. Most Linux distros are derived from some other distros. Today, there are two particularly large "family trees", Red Hat and Debian, with Debian being at the root of the largest tree.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg

So a large chunk of Linux distros out there take Debian and then modify it in some way to make their own.

It's been around for a very long time, as Linux distros go.

It doesn't have a company running it the way Ubuntu or Red Hat do.

It does major releases of stable about every two years, which is less-frequent then most distros I've used, more comparable to, say, Ubuntu Long Term Support releases.

Maybe less of a focus on ease-of-use for new users.