I cut my teeth on Red Hat (before Fedora was a thing), used Gentoo for a few years when I cutely believed that waiting hours for compiles to finish was fun and useful, but for the last 8-10 years I've been on Debian.<p>It's not perfect, but it gets the job done. For my laptop I usually run testing, and then stick with stable for 6 months or so after it's released, before switching back to testing. For me, it's a good balance between stability and having recent versions of applications.