So far my favorite distros (with all of my hopping) are #Arch and #Debian . I currently have Debian freshly installed on my recreational PC. It's running super well.

I still have to tweak a fair bit to get things running as I like. I chose XFCE for my DE as it's the least likely to ever fall out of date after freezing.

Debian 9.6 stretch's kernel is 10 point releases behind, but XFCE is as good/current as it gets. I feel like it's kind of an ideal choice for a stable system.