Great article! While I answered yes to most of the questions, I’ve never gelled with vendors like fedora and suse, I’m not keen on flatpacks (don’t understand them, and they seem like work), and I like apt-get (and related, they’re pretty straight forward). You wrote
In the last few years, I’ve set up a Debian-based system that provides me with access to bleeding-edge packages but also top-notch stability.
Which is why I’ve been planning to use Debian for my transition from Win 11 back to Linux. I always keep a notebook to make rebuilds manageable (and seldom needed to rebuild). @unixdude (who had a name for the scheme) used what I’ll call build scripts. That sounds approachable as long as I’m the author (so I understand the pieces). Isn’t there something one could add to Debian to get most of the good parts and avoid using a “black box”?