I've heard a lot of praise for Debian and Ubuntu but the former was regularly kernel-panicking after updates (granted that was 10+ years ago so I am definitely not being up-to-date -- or even fair -- here) and the latter just keeps piling more and more stuff inside itself, defeating the purpose of a Linux box (for me at least; I want something much more minimal than macOS).
Not to mention Ubuntu moves more and more stuff to Snap and you get to the ridiculous situation of a basic calculator needing seconds to start. Yeah, frak that.
Furthermore, I use various CLI tools regularly in my work and I can't wait for Debian to update them 6 months in the future.
I need something that has the minimum amount of background processes but also without suffering any user or developer usability problems; so not like the absolutely minimal set of services but the minimally viable set of services that give you very usable machine without any bloat.
Maybe Arch is the best for my criteria but I installed Manjaro and never looked back since (2.5 years now). The only one problem I ever had was I think December 2022 when they shipped an OpenSSH version that hard-deprecated (read: removed / stopped support for) certain crypto algorithms, and my key was of course using one of them. I grumbled but connected a display and keyboard to the machine (it's one of my servers at home), migrated my keys to the new algorithms, put them on a USB pen drive, put them on my workstation and all was right again.
Not even once had I any of the "rolling distribution" problems that people mention regularly on Reddit. Of course I might have been lucky.
Lately I am meticulously extracting a fully OS-neutral dotfiles configuration (and I am like 95% done) and then will create a OS-neutral bootstrapping set of scripts and will install Manjaro on 2 or 3 of my spare laptops and I expect no problems at all. It's a very "out of your way" distro and I love it for that.
(I am aware that there are people who have a beef with Manjaro because apparently they outright "stole" code -- which sounds meaningless to me when we're talking open-source, can somebody explain? -- and just rebranded stuff for themselves but as their user I can egotistically claim this has absolutely zero effect on me, I don't care and I use the distro because it hits the right spots for me.)
I love my iMac Pro but the tinkering possibilities are vastly reduced compared to any Linux box (example: I want to experiment with ZFS and BCacheFS but of course both are not supported on a Mac, and virtualization / containerization is much more inefficient -- and slow -- on a Mac compared to a Linux machine). I will very likely be buying an M2 (or M3 when they come out) laptop just for the excellent display and will do my work "on it" by actually remoting to a Linux workstation.
Plus, call me an old fart but I'd like my `ps aux` output to be maximum 70 lines long. I want control over my machine.
Maybe I'll come crying back to Macs in a few years, who knows. But I'll make a very serious effort to take back control of my computing in the meantime.