I think the key difference is "10 years ago"; Debian Stable today is a much more pleasant experience than Debian Stable a decade ago. I haven't used Arch so I

I think the key difference is "10 years ago"; Debian Stable today is a much more pleasant experience than Debian Stable a decade ago. I haven't used Arch so I can't comment there, but there's been a lot of improvement in hardware compatibility over the years. Being any sort of early-adopter on the hardware front will, as always, get you punished with configuration file editing, though.