Having read through your post av few times now, I honestly think your best bet is a Manjaro KDE install. Manjaro will give you the power and flexibility of Arch, with the stability you're looking for in a daily driver, and you'll have access to both the Manjaro repo as well as the AUR. It's far lower maintenance than Arch, has an additional layer of "security" by way of the Manjaro package vetting process, and will always have newer, more up-to-date packages than Debian (even testing or unstable). I think you'd be very happy with this choice.
Another distro for you to consider might be Solus though. It's a rolling release, built from scratch distro with a great community, responsive devs, and is a very stable and powerful distro. The package selection is far more limited than what you'll find with most other distros, but during my year+ with it, I didn't run across an issue with package availability. I was able to get my dev environment set up just fine. There is a KDE version of Solus, but if you give it a spin, I'd highly recommend at least kicking the tires on their Budgie DE.
Great answer, thanks for your perspective. The only holdup for me is that I'm interested in Debian-compatibility, but everything else about this route resonates with me.
That's two votes for Solus, too, which admittedly wasn't really on my radar. Will definitely take a closer look.
I know a couple of others have mentioned this, but if you're interested in Debian compatibility, Pop!_OS is worth a look. It's currently my daily driver, since it supports my System76 hardware, but outside of that, it's just a great distro and an excellent example of Gnome at its best. What's kept me using it (besides the hardware support) is the baked-in live environment for recovery. It's saved me a couple of times over the last 12 months, after making stupid errors that otherwise may have forced me to reinstall. Having a live recovery system like that is really a great feature, and one that no other distro (to my knowledge) has yet.
Another interesting point about Pop is that they're in the process of implementing a lot of optimizations from Intel's Clear Linux project, so if you've got an Intel-powered machine, some serious performance improvements are in the near future. I believe Solus has some of the Clear Linux optimizations as well, since their former lead dev, Ikey, actively worked at Intel on the Clear Linux project.
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Having read through your post av few times now, I honestly think your best bet is a Manjaro KDE install. Manjaro will give you the power and flexibility of Arch, with the stability you're looking for in a daily driver, and you'll have access to both the Manjaro repo as well as the AUR. It's far lower maintenance than Arch, has an additional layer of "security" by way of the Manjaro package vetting process, and will always have newer, more up-to-date packages than Debian (even testing or unstable). I think you'd be very happy with this choice.
Another distro for you to consider might be Solus though. It's a rolling release, built from scratch distro with a great community, responsive devs, and is a very stable and powerful distro. The package selection is far more limited than what you'll find with most other distros, but during my year+ with it, I didn't run across an issue with package availability. I was able to get my dev environment set up just fine. There is a KDE version of Solus, but if you give it a spin, I'd highly recommend at least kicking the tires on their Budgie DE.
Great answer, thanks for your perspective. The only holdup for me is that I'm interested in Debian-compatibility, but everything else about this route resonates with me.
That's two votes for Solus, too, which admittedly wasn't really on my radar. Will definitely take a closer look.
I know a couple of others have mentioned this, but if you're interested in Debian compatibility, Pop!_OS is worth a look. It's currently my daily driver, since it supports my System76 hardware, but outside of that, it's just a great distro and an excellent example of Gnome at its best. What's kept me using it (besides the hardware support) is the baked-in live environment for recovery. It's saved me a couple of times over the last 12 months, after making stupid errors that otherwise may have forced me to reinstall. Having a live recovery system like that is really a great feature, and one that no other distro (to my knowledge) has yet.
Another interesting point about Pop is that they're in the process of implementing a lot of optimizations from Intel's Clear Linux project, so if you've got an Intel-powered machine, some serious performance improvements are in the near future. I believe Solus has some of the Clear Linux optimizations as well, since their former lead dev, Ikey, actively worked at Intel on the Clear Linux project.