I'd also recommend XFS over EXT4.
My most recent experience with XFS is now about 17 years old. I don't know the current state of things, but back then it was notorious for data corruption on power loss: open files would become filled with zeroes (or have zero size, I don't remember exactly now) when power was cut. This is the reason why I never cared to use XFS since then. Ext4, OTOH, has always served me very well in every situation, and I can say that about its predecessors, ext2 and ext3, too.
I'd also not recommend a Debian based distro, except for maybe a modern Ubuntu. They usually use old packages and kernels, that make sense for a server (primarily for stability reasons), but not so much for a desktop.
This is true if we speak about the stable branch. In this case, yes, stable versions are released once in every several years, and the software often becomes way outdated by the next release.
However, the current testing branch (eventually to become the next stable release) is almost always good to go with for a desktop. It receives reasonably fresh updates, though not always the very latest ones, it rarely has any issues with package dependencies, and I see no problem recommending it for a general Linux user except maybe a very beginner one.
With a little more experience, adding sid (unstable) to your sources.list works well to have more recent packages when you need them, and then, one step further, you can add a
deb-src entry for the experimental branch to download the very latest versions of source packages for what you need and build them on your local system to have the respective dependencies.
RedHat/OpenSuse or Arch based distros are usually better at having up-to-date packages / compiler tool chains. NixOS is an interesting option too.
RedHat (as well as RHEL and CentOS) has always been the most painful thing in the world for me when it came to updating packages. The infamous "RPM hell". But that was a long time ago.
I started with RedHat, but then got fed up and converted it to Debian (live, by replacing RPM binary packages with debs one by one, imagine that!) for that very reason.
Did you mean Fedora? That one's supposed to be more flexible, I think, but I've never used it.