[insidious]

Hm

Really depends what you want. If you want alot more customization I'd roll with Arch, and if i wasn't very experienced i'd roll with something that runs off of arch. I'd probably hop into a DE at first, probably Gnome or XFCE, and then once i'm more comfortable using Arch i'd uninstall it and use i3 or something like that.

I say Arch rather than Debian for customization because arch is rolling release. This doesn't have anything explicitly to do with customization, but it means that if you're using some packages they will be updated more frequently which means you can use their features sooner (some of those features may be eye candy releated) whereas with debian you have to adhere to their release cycle

Debian or maybe even Ubuntu is the distro to use if you want stability, though