I've been on XFCE for about a decade and it's mostly the same as it was.

Very nice environment, even me with my C rants, am quite pleased with XFCE desktop experience and available extensions.

If you want years, just choose Debian.

In my experience the problem with Debian is that sooner or later you're bound to want to use something that is only 5 years old and therefore not included yet, so you end up having to install it from source or something else, but something doesn't quite work right so you have to hack it one way or another, and over time all this cruft adds up and you end up with a broken system caused precisely because the base distro refused to change fast enough.

I no longer use Debian, but when I did, I always used Debian Testing, never had any major issues that weren't my own fault, and packages are way more up-to-date. Worth trying if you're in that ecosystem still, and you want later stuff than 1-2 years old softwrae.

When I used Debian on desktop, I never used anything but unstable. It was never unstable except maybe in a very relative sense.

Lots of Linux software these days are also distributed as flatpack or appimage, and appimage in particular is dead simple if what you want has it available: place the file wherever on the path, make it executable, and done.

brew is a decent compromise between "breaking debian" and running newer stuff and newer versions of things for desktop use at least.

For servers, we just use containers.