For me Debian has really been "the girl next door" of Linux distros over the past 20 years. I've been momentarily pulled away by "the new hotness" like Gentoo, Ubuntu, Arch, or Flatcar. But I just keep going back to Debian.
With a recent price drop I decided to upgrade the storage on my Thinkpad T480s, so I had occasion to reinstall the OS. I went with Debian Bullseye. Choosing all the default settings with LightDM and XFCE, everything except wireless "just worked." Understandably, I had to enable non-free for the Intel wireless firmware, but a simple apt install had that working flawlessly.
Everything about my base system is perfect for me. Booting is quick. Power management is great, with the battery (now at 90% of its original capacity) easily lasting all day. Full volume encryption setup was effortless. I even got Secure Boot running after following some steps (more or less copy-and-paste) from the Debian wiki. When the time comes to upgrade the laptop wholesale to something with a more recent CPU, I half expect that simply moving the M.2 SSD from my current laptop to the new laptop will just work, or at least will require minimal tweaking.
I've tried using snap to get more recent versions of things, but that ended up being more trouble than it's worth. Now I just build my own containers, running them with UID/GID mapping, giving access to X11, and bind mounting a dedicated home directory for the app. Sort of like a poor man's snap or Flatcar Linux, but it's easy enough to figure out, I get more customization, and I get to keep my old familiar Debian environment.
With a recent price drop I decided to upgrade the storage on my Thinkpad T480s, so I had occasion to reinstall the OS. I went with Debian Bullseye. Choosing all the default settings with LightDM and XFCE, everything except wireless "just worked." Understandably, I had to enable non-free for the Intel wireless firmware, but a simple apt install had that working flawlessly.
Everything about my base system is perfect for me. Booting is quick. Power management is great, with the battery (now at 90% of its original capacity) easily lasting all day. Full volume encryption setup was effortless. I even got Secure Boot running after following some steps (more or less copy-and-paste) from the Debian wiki. When the time comes to upgrade the laptop wholesale to something with a more recent CPU, I half expect that simply moving the M.2 SSD from my current laptop to the new laptop will just work, or at least will require minimal tweaking.
I've tried using snap to get more recent versions of things, but that ended up being more trouble than it's worth. Now I just build my own containers, running them with UID/GID mapping, giving access to X11, and bind mounting a dedicated home directory for the app. Sort of like a poor man's snap or Flatcar Linux, but it's easy enough to figure out, I get more customization, and I get to keep my old familiar Debian environment.