I've used a number of distros as a desktop user looking for a lean platform and have to say that all the distros I've tried so far have their merits (IMHO).
My first distro like many was Mint, tried many DE's but eventually through trial and error found that XFCE was the spin for me.
After many years of using Mint I started to find it a bit bloated with feature creep for my modest machine and so moved to Manjaro, this I really enjoyed for quite some years as it was an arch based distro and was focussed on XFCE as its main desktop environment. Sadly after many years this too began to slow down my machine (not by windows standards, but it wasn't as fluid and quick as it once had been).
Eventually I decided that the time has come to distro hop once more, but couldn't decide initially what my destination would be, I decided that stability was most important, but I also wanted something which would be relatively easy to get drivers for as all the distros that I'd used so far relied upon using user repositories and non-official drivers for lots of things such as printers and scanners).
After thinking carefully about what I wanted and what was important to me (rather than what journo websites say you should be using this day of the week) there was one distro which clearly fitted the bill me and that was Debian (XFCE of course). It's a little more tricky than other distro's for 1st timers but not that much , you just have to be prepared to get a little more familiar with CLI compared to other distro's (but that is a good thing).
I've been with Debian since Bullseye launched (I was specifically waiting for the new release cycle) and it was the best thing I've ever done. I really wish that I'd picked Debian as my 1st distro. For me it's just perfect, it is super stable, it is very lean on ressources, pretty much every hardware manufacturer that produces debian drivers will do so for Debian, the updates and time lost doing them is tiny (as you're just getting security updates rather constantly downloading the latest program versions.
It may not be everyone's cup of tea (especially if you have to have the latest versions of software.
But if stability, speed and lean resource use are important to you then it could be for you a youtube reviewer once summed Debian up by labelling it a boring distro (because nothing ever goes wrong).
