In the end you could use any distro which desktop you like (which could be Debian stable, or something immutable) and then get your applications from the latest and greatest with Distrobox
Distrobox looks really interesting. Do you know the memory or CPU overhead for using it? I have older hardware. Will distrobox perform well on it? Thanks.
No, cpu wise there should not really be an overhead, as it just uses docker or podman to run the application in question. the only bottleneck i see could be host filesystems that are not supported by docker/podman and therefore could lead to slow file access in the container.