Well the solution here is to just use the superior distro, naturally.
This post will surely upset nobody.
is there a way to make it work like a rolling release of sorts? i’d want to use debian, but i don’t want to stay with old packages and wait 2 years for an update
You could just go with Debian unstable. I rarely ran into issues while running it in a rolling release style.
Debian testing might also work for you. But it will have a freeze window before each release.
As will have debian unstable. That’s the way it goes, for a few months every few years it slows down until the new stable gets released. Testing is just 10 days after unstable to avoid the biggest bugs.
Never had big problems with debian unstable in 15 years though, as long as you use apt-listbugs