My Mom has no clue she uses Arch (EOS) as long as she can video chat with my aunt and play solitaire she’s happy. BTW I’m her tech support too.
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I’d like to think that, hopefully, once Wayland has bedded down next year, we’re through what could only be described as puberty, - the tough, painful stuff, whether it was KDE4, Pulseaudio, or anything else related to the last couple of decades of evolution and progress, that’s behind us.
I could easily just sit on my current install and not have to wipe and repave for at least eight years, so long as I don’t intentionally break it through lack of knowledge. Boring and dependable? Boring, - no, dependable, yes. Rolling releases are a great balance between the two if you’re comfortable keeping up with the changes.
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Absolutely, I wouldn’t want to paint one in a better light than the other as it is merely a matter of preference, I think. 
I’d like to think that, too, but I would just be deluding myself. Experience tells me that it’s infinitely more probable that it’s just going to be a mess.
Especially given what a terrible idea Wayland was in the first place – common sense tells you that this will not end well.
Weird bugs are inevitable at this point. Expect every compositor to implement Wayland in its own particular way, simply because pure Wayland protocol is feature deficient. Thos means some software will work better in some DEs than in others. You will have stuff like screenshot tools that work only on KDE or only on ɢɴᴏᴍᴇ, etc… There will be many more inconsistencies than there are now, and lots and lots of bugs. And most software will continue to be X clients, so to run them under Wayland, you’ll need to use Xwayland, anyway. That is not going away any time soon.
So expect an even bigger mess in the future.
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I spent 6 months on Wayland on Gnome (the only DE where it sort of works) then switched to Cinnamon on X11. I was surprised how much of my day had been spent fighting Wayland. It was refreshing to install a favorite app and just have it work as expected. I can imagine in our Wayland future I’ll be booting into a VM and running Ubuntu 12.04.
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Yeah, I’m afraid you’re correct…
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I hope you find a system you’re happy with. One gets in the habit of treating upgrades in a routine fashion, and then it becomes alarming when it suddenly doesn’t work. I’ve been pretty lucky, I guess. I’ve only been upgrading EOS every 2-3 months for the last few years, and haven’t encountered problems since the grub update failure to boot that occurred some time ago.
I run a dual-booted system supporting both EOS and Windows 11. It took quite a bit of work to fully configure everything to my satisfaction (though much less work than Arch would have), but it has been running like a champ since. I’m not pushing any boundaries with my hardware, but it’s only several years old. I run both an HP Spectre laptop and a custom x86 rig from Puget Systems with an NVIDIA graphics card. Would a configuration guide help? I could document my experiences if there is an interest.
What types of problems are people having? Hardware-related? Config-related? Non-working package upgrades? Kernel problems? File-system problems? Window manager/desktop problems? Boot problems?
Debian is a great distro. Especially if you need fewer updates.
Check out Sparky Linux or Solydxk if you’re looking for something similar to an Endeavour like experience for Debian.
Or obviously just Debian proper.
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Currently I’m simultaneously running:
- EOS/Openbox (Arch based)
- Debian/Bookworm/LXQt/Xfwm4 (Debian)
- MXLinux/Xfce (Debian based)
on various pieces of hardware.
All three are good distributions and I would not hesitate to recommend any one of the three. But if pushed real hard to chose only one, I might just chose MXLinux. It has a ton of things already installed and configured. Be aware that it is sans-systemd.
If updates breaking the OS bothers you, Debian Stable is the way.
It’s nice that you mentioned Solydxk. I used it many years ago and I liked it. I had already forgotten it still exist. It’s strange it doesn’t get more attention nowadays when discussed about debian based distros. I think I will download their latest iso and try it just for fun… 
[Edit] Nevermind. I installed latest iso and it ended to grub error:
`efi_wrap_1' not found
So that was my short experiment with Solydxk… 
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I think Arch is a solid distro or a base as long as the person in front of the screen has learned how it works.
I came from Windows → RHEL → CentOS → OpenSUSE → Debian → Ubuntu → MSLinux → EOS/Arch.
Arch is bleeding edge which means it gets everything new and shiny. There’s always some kind of a new update available in Arch. But that doesn’t mean we need to upgrade.
I’m happy to hear that you have found what you’re looking for. Debian is a rock-solid distro. Because its code base and the other updates are vetted a lot and proven to be error or bug-less. But that doesn’t mean it won’t break.
I’ve been using EOS almost since it was released and I’m yet to face any major issue. I use this as my daily driver. Except at work because I’m a .NET developer so have to use Windows for that.
Don’t know how often you did your upgrades but it’s best to wait at least a week to do a system upgrade. Most issues that get released with new updates will be fixed by that time.
Anyway, hope you have a good time Debian and I would recommend MXLinux even though it’s based on Debian it comes with all the bells and whistles you need.
What about security updates? Are you waiting a week too? This means checking every day what updates are available.
I use arch-audit which informs me about security updates. If I miss one or an update comes out before I update. It informs me. When that happens I do update. But I rarely have to break my pattern.
I’ve never used it but @Stagger_Lee has been using it forever. I always add it based on his recommendation.
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Actually, I found that my MX-Linux had systemd enabled - it just didn’t boot from it (unless knowledgably hacked). If you have a need for something on systemd, it will work…
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So far I haven’t had a need for systemd, but if I do I’ll keep this in mind.
PS: Just booted MXLinux with systemd support. Easy.