I have to agree with you on Debian as far as stability is concerned. Debian is a top-notch server OS.
But they removed a few of my favorite desktop programs from their stable repo and that had me fuming !!! I only want to run stable, not testing. They also compartmentalized Python's pip3 into local user virtualenv, which I do not like since I use sand-boxing to invoke pip apps anyway.
That said, after many years of trying different distros I always kept coming back to Debian and that is where I'm staying.
I've only had bad experiences with debian. First off the installer is broken, second apt is a fucking mess compared to the best package manager, emerge, and third I've had bootloader issues(or lack of bootloader issues) when trying to install.
Are you sure you downloaded the ISO with non+free included?
For the longest time Debian kept separate ISOs for the non+free drivers, boot stuff, etc. and the user had to search the site for them. Recently with the latest release of Debian Bookworm the Debian maintainers stopped separating them and put the non+free stuff in the main ISOs. If it was more than a few months ago that you tried installing that could be the reason you had problems. I'm not saying that it is, but it could be.
Run Debian testing or get packages from backports if you need newer packages. It's still more stable than a rolling distro.
Debian stable is great if you value stability over everything else, for example on a server, or a desktop PC you want to "just work". Major updates happen around once every 2 years, not 5 years.
Manjaro is an OK Arch-based distro, but has some rough edges. Which led me to drop it and go back to Debian. Waiting for huge downloads and long compile times from AUR had me really annoyed.
> "Want to code on that thing too? Uh. Idk. Use other distro, would be much easier as debian sucks in this category."
Not if one is using the ultimate secret weapon of coding: Lazarus.
Nothing comes close for rapid development of Linux applications. And I mean nothing. Need to make a networking application. Built-in. Choose from several GUI kits such as GTK, QT, FLTK, FpGUI? Built-in. Need to create an operating system? Drop down some inline assembler for the BIOS loader and do the EFI PXE in Lazarus or any other editor, and point your kernel to your FreePascal binaries.
Almost anything you can do with C, you can do with FreePascal and Lazarus with the world's best free RAD IDE and a bazillion units built in. I have found no single IDE that has so much just ready to patch together into a working Linux application.
But it looks like it can only do Pascal? Like. Sorry but you can't just come out of the corner and say that coding is great on debian because my special IDE for only one single programming langauge exists.
What if I don't want to learn a seventh programming language? What if I want to continue my C++ project in NeoVim? I dont want to rewrite something entirely. Same for PHP, Rust, C, Python.
Your IDE doesn't even support the most important way of editing code. Vim mode.