Debian => stale packages (Really solid distro though but dated version of Gnome)
Did you try using the testing or unstable versions of Debian? Testing is still more stable than some other distros. Packages need to be in unstable with no major bug reports for 10 days before they migrate to testing.
Try Debian sid (unstable), from my experience it's actually more stable than testing because it gets updates even more often.
And ditch Gnome. There is no way to be happy with it as it craps out very often and is a maintenance burden for maintainers, therefore the quality differs so much.
you have to spend an insane amount of time updating
How slow is your internet connection?
or it will reach EOL in no time
Sure you don't confuse Fedora with non-LTS Ubuntu releases? According to https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/lifecycle/ each release is supported for 13 months which isn't 10 years of LTS but hardly "in no time" either.
I don't mean downloading updates I mean manually updating your configuration to adapt to new versions of the software. That's what takes time. I know 13 months is already quite high but it feels too low for me. I'm running servers over longer periods than that
Fedora annoys me (even though I've been using it for like 2.5 years on my work laptop) because a lot of packages that would be in extra in something like the Ubuntu (and it's derivatives) or Arch (and it's derivatives) is in a separate repository that you have to add.