A great option I've found is to use the DietPi distribution that has Pi-hole configuration/install wizard built in (https://dietpi.com)

After having various weird network issues and instability on a different OS with Pi-hole (updates often broke), I switched to DietPi, and now my PiHole and OS upgrades are extremely stable.

The DietPi installer/configuration for Pi-hole sets up all the networking for you in the install "wizard", took all the weird networking headaches out for me

What issues have you encountered? I haven't seen any problems with it.

I've run into the same. It often would come back from a reboot without DNS restarted correctly. I never went through a Pi Hole update without having to manually fix things either.

A few weeks ago I switched to Ad Guard Home. Has been rock solid since. The big dancehaus it doesn't support the exact same filter files.

I believe you can add your own filter files, so in this sense you could basically link the same ones right?

Definitely, and I've added some of the same ones.

What I meant is it doesn't seem to parse the same range of formats, so it rejected some of Pi Hole's filters as malformed.

Yeah - I found it ironic that out of the box I couldn't get a pi-hole to do DNS lookups. It always took manual fixing.

I know this isn't terribly helpful to you, but I have never had any problems with using or upgrading Pi Hole. I have been running mine for a few years now, and everything has been smooth and error-free.