Debian is just as quick, and does not have the problematic "rolling" updates of Arch. (It does have the "testing" and "unstable" channels which are roughly comparable, but the Debian folks won't tell you to use them in production.)
> problematic "rolling" updates
Rolling updates for me have not been problematic.
I've had a few updates that gave an error message, and they were easily fixed in one minute after searching the arch website.
I think one was a key expired - I had to manually update it and redo the update process.
The other I can recall was a package that had become obsolete/conflicting and a question had to be answered.
In general rolling updates are a tiny blip every few months.
In comparison, the several debian based distributions I've run have been a "lost weekend" type of upgrade for major updates.
Debian is not just as quick (significantly slower and higher resource usage), but Arch isn't all that fast nowadays, either.
Debian - or Devuan if you don't want systemd - can be made as spartan as you want. It boots in those mentioned few seconds on my 15yo T42p (Pentium [email protected], 2GB). Use Sid/Unstable if you want more up-to-date software with the accompanying larger flow of updates.
> Debian is not just as quick (significantly slower and higher resource usage)
In which respects? Are you talking about apt vs pacman or something? Default DEs?
I had an ubuntu machine that took a while to boot even with an SSD. Later I installed arch linux on the same machine and boom! it would be to the desktop in seconds. It was night and day.