It’s my choice but Arch and its derivatives look like the trend like CachyOS which is #1 right now on visits on distrowatch. Also I’ve heard Google use Debian as gLinux and I feel many other giants also use it and sponsor it and I’m not comfortable choosing it as my distro. Can the sponsors togethwr with students or any other interested use it for their PCs, either coding or ordinary use? It strictly promotes free but worried about giants and sponsors.
Debian has been our choice for web hosting for the last fifteen years, and my choice of desktop PC for the last three without issue.
Most games run out of the box with proton, if that’s your worry, and you can use heroic to get proton going with games from epic and gog with reasonable ease. Wine in general, for me, has had better luck running old legacy windows programs better than windows can manage these days.
I wouldn’t take Debian’s stability and reliability over anything; I can do everything I need with it.