In the age of AI, there are only more and more security vulnerabilities to be discovered, and backporting all of them to outdated kernels will be nigh impossible. I’d not rather make such security patches dependent on the timeliness of backports especially if it is done by a distro. I suggest you use a rolling distro rather than anything with LTS kernels. The CVE in the original post CVE-2026-98432 is fixed since 7.3 and 7.3.1 is already out. If a distro doesn’t offer kernel 7.3.1 today, rule it out.

In general I find distros using old kernels annoying because Linus treats compatibility seriously and “don’t break use space” has been their mantra for many years. On desktops in particular, GPU driver improvements like https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-DRM make it super worthwhile.

I personally use Debian both on my servers and desktops, for the last 15 years or so.

Ubuntu has been the easy default for things like WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) for my coding on Windows, and a linux VM on my home server. But I don't really like the idea of having a distro that doesn't treat security patching with urgency in the age of AI-fueled exploits. Need a standard distro with decent hardware support, low churn, and fast patching.

People are saying Debian. What are the tradeoffs? (other than faster patching on Debian of course)

I switched back to Debian.

Rocky Linux. But I've built my career working with RHEL-compatible/derivative distros like CentOS, Fedora.

FreeBSD

I think debian is a polular choice