I've only had bad experiences with debian. First off the installer is broken, second apt is a fucking mess compared to the best package manager, emerge, and third I've had bootloader issues(or lack of bootloader issues) when trying to install.

If you have a device with a specific usage, then its more than perfect as its stable.

Only need to draw and write documents on a portable convertable? Suits nicely.

Want to code on that thing too? Uh. Idk. Use other distro, would be much easier as debian sucks in this category.

Run Debian testing or get packages from backports if you need newer packages. It's still more stable than a rolling distro.

Debian stable is great if you value stability over everything else, for example on a server, or a desktop PC you want to "just work". Major updates happen around once every 2 years, not 5 years.