Debian 12 has had at least two system breaking bugs in the last month or two,
What are you talking about specifically? I do manage dozens of Debian 12 servers and run it in one of my desktop machines since the release I didn’t run into any issues so far, stable as usual but I would be interested in knowing about those.
I honestly don’t understand the love for Debian either.
Because, like Ubuntu, it’s truly community driven, not subject to the whims of some corporation and more stable than the others.
Also recommending GNOME to anyone used to Windows is just going to frustrate them if they’re already hesitant.
While I get your point and I like XFCE very much, the “what you go for it’s entirely your choice” mantra when it comes to DE is total BS. What happens is that you’ll find out that while you can use any DE in fact GNOME will provide a better experience because most applications on Linux are design / depend on its components. Using KDE/XFCE is fun until you run into some GTK/libadwaita application and small issues start to pop here and there, windows that don’t pick on your theme or you just created a frankenstein of a system composed by KDE + a bunch of GTK components;