I had my first experience with Slack some 24-5 years ago. After that I used many distributions and their variations on both personal computers and work servers or desktops. Used them on Digital and HP "workstations" from the 90ties, Sun machines, SGI, with text-only terminals, with graphical terminals. Had admin experience with Slackware, Mandrake, Redhat, CentOS, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Linux Mint, Linux Mint DE, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Arch, Parabola OS, Fedora, Debian, even some specialized like Clonezilla, gNewSense, Scientific Linux, ClearOS, Gentoo (compiled a whole WAMP based server from scratch once). I must be forgetting at least several of them that I used.

I don't understand people who are frantic supporters of some distribution or some packaging system. They are all very similar and it is really easy to hop from one to another in a matter of a day. You just need to think through your first install in the proper way and decide on a stable partition setup where it will be easy to just switch to another one.

At this moment I am running Ubuntu studio on my personal computer. Why? Because I am experimenting with open-source software for music, and Ubuntu Studio is setup in the proper way to have everything audio without much hassle. Before that I had Arch, and although I spent months trying to setup everything to work as I wished, I had many problems. As I said, I don't have trouble fiddling with configurations and recompiling the whole OS from source, I did that many times in the past, sometimes you don't have so much time and you need to appreciate to good effort that some other people put, to have a complete system targeted to some type of usage (such as audio).

When I have a choice, the servers I maintain are running Debian.

The largest problem of many distributions is:
- stable distributions use stale versions of software and rolling distributions are unpredictable, so you always do a compromise depending what is your primary target for daily use.

In the past distributions boasted how extensive their library of ready-to-install packages is.

Nowadays, I fear that many distributions will stop supporting most of the software packages except for a very few, and move everything to image-based partial-os-snapshots like appimage, flatpak or snap. The problem is that - while snap, appimage and flatpak are modern ways to have fresh software and they all work in some or another way, the software vendors forget themselves and literally needlessly pack 1GB of libraries for a single mostly useless application, that you use once a month. If you have installed 100 simple applications of 1GB, in the end you will have 100 mounts to virtual drives for 100 too-simple apps, taking 100 GBs.

Instead application vendors should stick to sources that are easy to compile, and sources that are Portable, so that anyone is able to support them on any OS or distro. E.g. like Maven usually works for most Java apps - you just run mvn package and it will download all needed dependencies and run all procedures that are needed to create an installable package of the software, so that it is easy for distributions to pack it and ship it, instead of spending hours and hours figuring out compilation and packaging bugs.