Servers: Debian Stable no DE
Desktop: Pop OS or Ubuntu
I’ve used everything from Arch and Gentoo to fedora and Ubuntu. But I found myself enjoying the stability of Debian but hating the lack of newer packages. The latter of which isnt usually a problem when it comes to single purpose servers.
Yes and no. They seem to prioritize stability and security over everything else. So they usually only push updates to the stable repo if it doesn’t compromise those 2 points (so new features are okay but so long as they don’t create new instability or at the very least fix a security flaw).
So in other words nothing there is particularly ancient but most things are several versions behind just due to bugs being found etc. Great for servers but on a desktop most people wouldn’t notice these kind of bugs so they tend to get pushed in other distro’s a lot sooner.