I also found debian to be a good base, although I hardly found any difference between it and ubuntu. The last month has been a roller coaster for me because of the multiple distro hops. While I was happily using Fedora on my desktop computer. My laptop kept getting hardware issues. When Pop!_OS updated to kernel 5.15, bluetooth and audio were acting up so I came back to Zorin OS, only to find that Zorin OS had sleep issues with 5.13.x. This did not happen to me before, since 5.13 was always very stable for me. Later I switched Kubuntu 20.04..Same sleep issues. I think a point release broke sleep for me. LMDE with 5.07 had webcam and audio issues. When Pop upgraded to 5.16, I switched back, only to get my hopes shattered. 5.16 and 5.17 audio issues, with boot issues, sleep issues as well as bluetooth problems. Then I switched to Fedora on my laptop as well. All problems were gone even though I was no the same kernel. I really don't care about the OS controlling my decisions any more as long as my computer works without giving BSODs now and then or any other hardware problems.
I was just too tired of troubleshooting problems. Fedora seemed like saviour. Let's hope they keep fedora the way it is and not take any BS steps like ubuntu forcing a particular package manager down the throat of users.
From what I understood, Fedora has mre package managers than debian; yum, dnf, flatpak and you can install from rpms and appimages as well.(unlike ubuntu which recently borked appimages). By the way don't expect synaptic to work on fedora, it only supports apt. Did you try dnfdragora? It is not as good as synaptic but it does its work on my fedora xfce spin.