I have been running Debian Stable on my (gaming/coding/general use) desktop and on my work laptop for close to a decade now, and I have had very few problems, things just work. The last problem of "too old system libraries" nature I remember was maybe 5 years ago, when Steam client did not work because of too old glibc, but one Debian release later the problem was gone.

I don't think it's as bad as most people think it is, nowadays.