Arch on a Thinkpad is pretty good.

Ironically, arch has been a better "stable" distro for me than Debian, which I used for years previously.

The problem with the stable distros, when used as a desktop, is you inevitably get into a situation where you need a newer version of something, but the whole stack of libraries the system provides isn't compatible. It leads to a "frankendebian" situation which is much worse than just dealing with a binary rolling distro where the latest version of anything you want is a pacman paru install away.