I assure you a great many people take Linux seriously.

Do you remember any examples of things that made you turn away from those other distros?

Most big distros are old enough to drink though. Ubuntu is 20yo, Fedora 21yo, openSUSE 18yo, Arch 23yo, Gentoo 23yo. (I got curious and a bit carried away…)

But sure, Debian does have them beat by roughly 10 years (31yo).

My experience with Matrix is that the federation itself is a deal breaker. I have a pretty beefy server and good connection which was getting ddosed by running Matrix and timing out on so many requests for avatars/profiles etc. Maybe I did something wrong, but the whole experience rendered me quite skeptical to the viability of it as a federated chat.

That said I’ve had nothing but good experiences using it with big servers set up by pros.

For private use? Hot take, but Arch. It’s easy to maintain and not easy to break at all. I think I spend zero time on maintenance other than running package updates. I only reinstall when I get a new computer.

(I say for private use only because you’ll be getting weird looks from people if you use arch on a server in a professional setting, and it might break if you try to update it after five years of not doing it since there aren’t any “releases” to group big changes - in practice I run arch on my home server too with no issues)