If this was a desktop, I would quietly run the Debian installer and set up i3, however since this is not only a headless system running an Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU and is intended to run GPU-accelerated workloads, the name of the game is stability - there will be no desktop environment here (if i can help myself)

In previous Debian / Arch deployments, kernel and NVIDIA Driver mismatches occasionally caused display stack or driver breakage after system upgrades - i can't be having that here. Ubuntu Server (LTS) was selected because Canonical maintains tighter coordination between kernel releases and NVIDIA driver packages, reducing the likelihood of driver instability during updates. For a system intended to run long-term services, update behavior is a priority over customization (sorry polybar)

While Arch offers a huge amount of flexibility and bleeding-edge packages, that model introduces additional maintenance overhead and update risk - particularly in GPU environments. Debian is extremely stable, but not immune either, (*no OS really is) NVIDIA driver packaging can lag or require additional manual configuration depending on repository selection