> I honestly do not comprehend why so many folks base things on it.

In this case it's literally the OS offered by Dell for the XPS 13. It's as official an option as you will ever see, so the fact that such a pairing is still a broken disaster is pretty significant.

I could switch to a different distro, and I might. But distro hunting is exhausting. And it itself represents a never ending treadmill of churn. Like right now it seems like Fedora is a good option, and so are things like PopOS or Manjaro. But rewind the clock 5 to 10 years and some of those didn't even exist, or were not nearly as good of choices for "regular consumer usage." Whose to say I'm not just going to be stuck with yet another "oh, that distro used to be good but now it sucks, switch to foobar instead" in another few years? I'm more likely going to just switch it back to Windows if I'm going to get over the "back everything up & reinstall from scratch" hurdle. I at least know with Windows that I won't have to do a reinstall dance on this machine pretty much ever again. Having Linux for the better development options is nice, but with how good VMs are (and with things like WSL), running it bare metal kinda isn't all that necessary.

> Debian 11 was released less than a year ago, in August 2021.

Keep in mind though that it was branched and package versions frozen ~6 months before that.

I like debian and use it on some things, but for a personal computer I always found it frustrating that the software was already half a year out of date on release day. Software getting released today wont be in Debian stable until 2023.

I have no problems with Debian, but I think their release deltas should be cut in half. Firefox is deprecated on Debian, and that is their officially supported browser. I know that the whole point is stability, I just think that for home desktop users it's not a great experience.