Can't speak a ton on the part about taking full advantage of your hardware, but Debian is THE Just Works™ solution of Linux distributions. I've had not a single problem on Debian. I was on rolling-release Ubuntu (actually, it was KDE Neon) for a year after my first few weeks on Kubuntu, on which Plasma was TERRIBLY broken at the time. It used to apparently be broken on either Kubuntu or Neon at any given time, and never both, and I think it's stable enough everywhere now, but once I came to Debian, I have decided to never look back or "ahead". There's always an alternative method to achieve what you want on Debian.