This is kind of my story too. I stick with ubuntu LTS just for an added level of confidence things are compatible, but Arch might be a good idea to look into. The arch packages are a big plus. Do you find many compatibility issues?
Arch usually has more small "papercuts" I have to fix myself - often problems around suspend/power management or drivers, in my experience. Ubuntu and the likes I usually struggle either when I encounter some bug OOTB (meaning that won't get fixed in a timely manner because "stable") or once I need some package that's just not there. Having to figure out what are the damn dependency equivalents for some program I'm trying to compile that only has Arch instructions is never fun.
Obviously YMMV.
The advantage of stable distros is that you are not surprised with new bugs,feature removal or shiny redesigns.
When I needed a new driver to play some game I just installed an official PPA and got the driver and if I did not like it I could install the older version.
As a 10+ years long user of Ubuntu and its derivatives (currently Pop_OS!) I would say I know it is stable. Ubuntu still feels like a polished Debian for a typical computer user, which has many of pre-configuration made that non-techies and not-that-much-knowledgable persons will love. I don't like many decision they have made, e.g. favouring snap over apt, complete lack of a proper GUI for managing installed software/packages, sometimes missing packages that are on Debian but not on Ubuntu (though, the deb file can be downloaded and installed with a single command). After tremendous work done by GNOME users to tweak gnome-shell I have never had a freeze / hang up since three years on Ubuntu. I am also happy having recent drivers from Nvidia that works good enough to also never see any problem in 5+ year history related to GPU card. I also didn't have a problem to install drivers for my printer and scanner, which have a dedicated installer (deb file). I am just a happy user.
Calling kernel for a reason Ubuntu feels stable is wrong I think. I have tried many times Arch and I had many occasions to be not very convinced to its "stability". The most annoying issue I had on Arch was related to sound - when I was changing volume in Spotify client it was changing the system volume. Imagine the situation when you had a headphones with a volume level set at 3-4% and you have increased it by 20-50%, a nightmare for ears and hearth. After that "feature" I have completely removed Arch from my disk and I am not looking back to it nor other rolling distro.
These days I also don't see any unique selling point that Arch had in the past. It is still known for a best documentation and the most recent software. During last 2-3 years I don't remember if I had been complaining on outdated software in Ubuntu. If I would do then there are awesome projects like flatpak, xbps[0] or nix[1] that can be installed without changing my OS and they provide everything what I probably can win using Arch.
[1]: https://nixos.org/
I also like Ubuntu and I've used NixOS in the past. What I don't miss from Ubuntu are the PPA's, AUR is much much much nicer. If you plan to do any gaming in Linux, Arch is in the end much more convenient due to AUR.
And, I'm biased a bit because my installation is always quite minimal. I only have i3 and my tools for programming, and whatever is needed to run proton games.
I have just looked into the extra sources to see if I have any PPA there but I was surprised to see the only one, which come with a Pop_OS! to bring some custom tiling manager and other tweaks.
Frankly, era of PPAs has ended. I don't find many software packages shared on Launchpad nor I won't trust PPA owners to install anything from most of PPAs. There are better ways to share software and easier to set own APT server. Today, almost all software distributors I know (Microsoft, Slack, Sublime, Spotify, Hashicorp...) have their APT repository on also their server or on a packagecloud[0] / JFrog Artifcatory[1]
> If you plan to do any gaming in Linux.
To be honest, I find KVM with GPU pass-though a better idea overall (I can use software like Affinity Designer thanks to that). KVM is a really top-notch software if you know to configure it properly :) However, proton and wine can be installed without any problem on Ubuntu.
> And, I'm biased a bit because my installation is always quite minimal. I only have i3 and my tools for programming, and whatever is needed to run proton games.
I have a complete range of various programming tools and SDKs that hardly can be packed in 240GB disk. My current setup is rather small: Jetbrains IDEs, Unity3D, Qt Creator/Designer, emacs with orgmode, vim, various chat apps, Spotify, Syncthing, Sublime Text & Merge, rofi, pass, fossil, nginx, flutter, nimrod, nodejs, deno, zsh, golang, chicken-scheme, milena+ivona, orca, backup tools, terraform with terragrunt, multipass and some dotfiles and private scripts. It takes about 3h to complete format disk and install OS and provision all software I need (thanks to terraform). My DE is GNOME with a taskbar (Dash To Panel extension) instead of a dock. Is it minimal? Likely no, but it does its job.
I bought a beefy computer last year and installed Gentoo on it - it's obviously not for everyone, but its reputation as a hard to install distro is overstated, and if you have enough horsepower and ram, an emerge update isn't a big deal. Additionally, having the ability to tailor your builds to not include libraries you don't need AND to install the sources and debug information is huge. Mostly, though, it feels logically designed, and standard sysadmin tools allow you to do maintenance without much hassle.
I'd recommend at least looking into it to see if it fits your use case.
Never needed it yet, but it's good to have. I remember the problems in the past...
You can also do it with zfs, but I wanted to not have the filesystem as DKMS.
I also used it recently when I tried to get the new Assassin's Creed to run. I knew it was a bit of a crap shoot, so I took a snapshot before I started compiling and installing the Git versions of graphics and translations libraries. After a couple hours I realized it wasn't going to work and just rolled my root directory back to before I started throwing packages all over my system. It was very satisfying. :D
This was my experience with Arch as well. It left me feeling like I needed to check the wiki to see if there were any new warnings before updating.
I switched to distros that release ~6-12mo, and I have found my environment is much stable. Currently on Fedora, but considering trying out Suse Leap.
I've been using it a bit at work recently, and am probably going to move a personal machine or two over to it soon.
Otherwise it's the distro I'm having the least amount of problems. Specifically don't miss the PPA's from Ubuntu. With dist upgrades they are quite painful.
Both switches were for the same basic reason: packages broke just often enough that it wasn't worth the benefits of having a simple/clean system or bleeding edge libraries.
My switch to ubuntu was maybe 7-8 years ago, though, so I can't speak to whether this has changed. I just know that I used to need to spend 1-5 hours fixing an esoteric X.org problem (or similar) every few months on arch and that I don't need to do this on ubuntu.
I stay on ubuntu because of its critical mass of users. If there's a prebuilt package for something, it's probably a .deb that's compatible with ubuntu and debian. And PPAs are nice. I don't like where they're going with snap at all (I disabled snap and added flatpak support instead) and would probably switch if I thought another distro offered the same benefits.