@davidrevoy Interesting read. I'm not a digital artist, but my photo editing rig is on #Debian +X11 for many of the reasons you mentioned.
One of the reasons I've stayed on Debian for the last 15 years is that, due to its slow pace and overall conservatism, all of the "next big things" in Linux tend to be more feature complete and less buggy by the time they hit Debian stable.