Debian is what you make of it, definitely. But it is also inanely stability focused to the point of being a detriment. It takes many months for simple package updates to hit Debian repos and it leads to frustration when stuff I expect to be updated is still very much not. As a server distro I recommend it, but as a play around distro it’s a bit more annoying and you have to do a ton more self maintenance on packages to get the latest and greatest.