I will throw in another vote for Debian. >I am a practical person so while I appreciate purity I simply don't have time for it.Software is a means to an end.

I will throw in another vote for Debian. >I am a practical person so while I appreciate purity I simply don't have time for it.Software is a means to an end. This describes myself as well, and this is why I have used Debian (stable) for years on my personal servers and desktops. For an example, you can turn on unattended upgrades and not have to think much about it. The Debian maintainers work hard to keep the package repository stable. Obviously, this is a biased opinion, since I use Debian. I have used Arch in the past, and had some mishaps where I broke things by installing updates. On Arch, you need to vet updates more carefully. I don't want to have to be careful, because I want things to "just work" (as much as is possible in the realm of linux), so I use Debian.