@jhx I got to shortlist to just four... But there's many others I still love and would use: MX, antiX, Kiss Linux, OpenSUSE, Fedora... Or the *BSDs, if I just owned some hardware well supported, which I sadly don't.
Arch and Debian are pretty solid choices, and both are in my shortlist. If I have to finally ditch Ubuntu at some point (because annoyances), Debian is the most likely candidate to live in my dev machine. :)