This is the reference platform, the most deployed and the one on which most development is first done before being ported to other OSs and distros. If in doubt about which Linux distro to use, use this one. On Debian, both installing from source and installing from packages is supported and is mostly automated.

FreeSWITCH 1.8 announcement stated there will be support for Debian 9 "Stretch", that over time will become the preferred Linux distro.
Support for Stretch will probably be backported to FreeSWITCH 1.6, please check our http://freeswitch.org/confluence official documentation for up to the minute updates.

Be sure to start from a freshly deployed, updated, clean, bare Debian 8 (Jessie) Server 64 bit. You may want to use the netinst mini-image to minimize the initial download from Debian servers (because the packages will likely need to be updated anyway), or you can start from a regular Debian 8 installation medium.

If you don't have specific requirements, you can accept all default choices proposed by the instructions on screen. At the end of Debian deployment, when asked about software selection, choose only (pressing spacebar on the list items) the SSH server and the standard system utilities; we will install all other needed packages during the following steps ourselves:

After software selection, finish Debian deployment in the usual way, following the instructions on screen.

Then connect via ssh, and install and set the default locale to your preference (en_US.UTF-8UTF-8 can be a good default), using the CLI command

    dpkg-reconfigure locales:
  

Then click OK.

Then logout and login again, or better yet, reboot the machine altogether.

We can now start installing FreeSWITCH.