This is an excellent answer and match my experience exactly.

Just wan to add that I have been doing an aptitude full-upgrade/aptitude upgrade almost weekly, and have only encountered 2 packages that require user interactions so far: glibc (warning about restarting some services) and OpenJDK (licensing stuffs). Other packages just install "silently" during an upgrade.

Just use Debian, seriously. I'm running KDE 4.11.5 on Debian Sid for about a year now, and it has been a very pleseant experience. Also, Sid works more or less like a rolling release distro, so you will constantly get the latest version of the softwares you use. It's not as fast or as bleeding edge as some distros, but it's more way, way, _way_ more stable. For example, Sid gets the latest version of Firefox about a week after the official release, sometimes sooner than that. PS. I'm an ex-Arch users, having switched away from Arch due to many reasons, and couldn't be happier.