The problem is not the difficulties of any of these… if you are reasonably skilled you’ll master any of them… given enough time.
When I was a student I maintained a Slackware up/running/updated for my gf at the time… was it hard? No but it was a gigantic waste of time… and what I learned is not comparable to the amount of wasted time.
Same with OpenBSD… I love that operating system for networking (the most elegant firewall/netfilter I ever seen) but (1) didn’t have support for multi cpu for a looong time (2) drivers either worked out of box magically or good luck
All people you mentioned have better things to do than babysit an operating system and Debian (fedora I don’t use for decade, can’t say) is a pretty reasonable compromise of not treating you like a kid and not making you waste time
The problem is not the difficulties of any of these… if you are reasonably skilled you’ll master any of them… given enough time.
When I was a student I maintained a Slackware up/running/updated for my gf at the time… was it hard? No but it was a gigantic waste of time… and what I learned is not comparable to the amount of wasted time.
Same with OpenBSD… I love that operating system for networking (the most elegant firewall/netfilter I ever seen) but (1) didn’t have support for multi cpu for a looong time (2) drivers either worked out of box magically or good luck
All people you mentioned have better things to do than babysit an operating system and Debian (fedora I don’t use for decade, can’t say) is a pretty reasonable compromise of not treating you like a kid and not making you waste time