Currently running Fedora. Debian is good, but I appreciate being closer to the bleeding edge, and while Flatpaks help bridge the gap, they also make more up-to-date distros remain stable, and you wouldn’t use Flatpaks for system packages which also matter.

That's absolutely valid. I'm the opposite, in that I'll add something from backports or unstable if I wanna try something more "fresh". I've got a few flatpaks on my Debian desktop systems; not a fan of their sheer size, but I guess having all the dependencies bundled together is kinda the point... I equate Debian to a new Toyota, where the tech might be "outdated" compared to other brands (shipping a 6-speed auto when everyone else is shipping 8/9-speed autos, for example), but they ship it that way because the tech has a proven track record and won't break at inopportune moments, waiting to "update" when the next gen/version is more mature.

Previously ran Manjaro - nice premise, but the team does not have the capacity to pull it off just stable and good enough. It does tend to break after a while. I still wish their team all the best and hope it will one day become my home again - but not before they sort their mess.

I hold similar view points. It looks good... Needs more team members though. Maybe I'll throw it in a VM.

Arch on desktops is too much of a “debloated” experience for me - I don’t enjoy having to build my system from scratch, even though I know how. Also, the risk of updates borking the system is too high, and I’m not red-eyed enough to read all update notes. On experimental servers with just a few packages, though, it can be useful.

Yeah... I've got 5 kids, ain't nobody got time in my house for fixing something that shouldn't have broken 😂

Mint was actually quite buggy for me too, despite folks generally insisting on stability as one of its selling points. Also, they are strong on promoting Cinnamon, and I’m a KDE fanboy (and a bit of a Gnome enjoyer).

Ah, see, I used LMDE, not the Ubuntu-based one. I don't like the way Canonical is going, but I really like Cinnamon, and having a rock-solid Debian base with some Mint goodies on top was more than enough to get me to switch on both my personal laptop (Thinkpad T14 G1 AMD) and my gaming PC (custom build, 5800X3D/7900XTX). I considered Bazzite for a hot minute, but I'm much more familiar with Debian than Fedora (again, used Debian for years on servers, and was the first distro I actually installed on my own hardware when I first discovered Linux), plus there's a literal mountain range of documentation, forum posts, tips, and tricks for Debian. Not saying there isn't for Fedora, but I just know how to find info for Debian better than other distros.

Fedora caused me problems only once, and that is when I used universal Linux package to install proprietary NVidia drivers (use the package from Fedora repos to avoid my mistakes!). Other than that, and through several major updates, it works like a charm. It also automatically saves system images while updating, and you can easily load any. Stability-wise, it was same as Debian to me.

Nice. I like Fedora, very clean, but the constant updates drove me nuts. I used Fedora on an older laptop for a while, but I found that I was running updates more often than just...using it.