I use plain old Debian now, but used to love some of the Debian based distros. CrunchBang springs to mind.
I tend to stick pretty close to defaults these days, so some scripts and Ansible playbooks configure everything on all of my machines with not a lot of maintenance or future worries.
At the end of the day it's just running a build step in CI so that your machines just end up with the final image instead of running the playbook/script on each one. Hope that helps!
For example I saw that in your blog [1] you used the base on line 1 `FROM ghcr.io/cgwalters/fedora-silverblue:37`.
I was wondering where I could find the Containerfile for that, my Google-fu and searching through the Fedora pages are failing me
[1] https://www.ypsidanger.com/building-your-own-fedora-silverbl...
That's what ends up on quay.io/fedora-ostree-desktops/ which is what we use to make our base images.
Fedora is in the middle of a transition to make more official images on quay.io/fedora, I'm sorry I don't have the info offhand, it's probably in here somewhere: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tag/silverblue/l/top?pe...
On the note of quay.io, is there a function on the website to see the Containerfile that created the artifact? I recall digging around in the past but couldn't really find a link to the source Containerfile.
I run Debian on all of my server stuff at home too. It's not a perfect desktop, but the consistency between machines is something I appreciate.
I use it as my stable base while running most applications from Flatpaks. They're up to date but the OS itself never surprises me.