To be fair, at work I've used Debian a lot for servers, and it had worked pretty good all the time with very few exceptions. In comparison Ubuntu (which I know is Debian based) always breaks for me. It's amazing how I can always get stuff done in minutes in Debian but I always have a problem with Ubuntu. This is to the point that I would rather work with the botched in-house distro of Solaris I used on a mini mainframe I used to work with and maintain some 8 years ago than Ubuntu. Even with the weird customized vi/vim it had, that made life for me and the sys admin incredibly painful.
All that being said... Slackware was the distro that made me fall in love with Linux a decade and a half ago, and one of the reasons I'm jumping out of the Apple bandwagon is their recent tendency to make their machines more common-user friendly, but less of an "hackers" machine. Therefore, I'm tremendously biased regarding Os' and Distros.
The flipside is that Arch Linux has shown to be able to make sweeping and controversial changes rapidly for longer term benefit.
I've been using Ubuntu since Breezy and every upgrade I haven't had a problem. I use it on many of my machines (apart from my laptop due to Bumblebee) and have had no issues with the 6 month updates, but I usually stay on the LTS versions.