Nala is a great apt frontend. It supports parallel downloads of packages and speeds up the whole process up a lot.
Not sure which commands irk you as too long. Nala makes a good overview of changes like which package is bumped to what version and where it stands now. So I basically only use
nala upgrade
and take it from there. Updates the sources, lists the diff for upgradable packages and ask me to go forward or abort.
If you want to take a step in between: I am running Debian Testing on my notebook. Testing is the staging ground for the next major Debian Version, right now 13.
Still very much stable, but inherently more up to date packages. Not a real rolling release, but the closest you can get to a rolling Debian. Plenty of updates, but no problems in the past year I used it.
Pretty happy with Debian Testing. Frequent updates but still very stable and rock solid.
This is the closest to a rolling Debian release, and I really like it. It’s basically the next major release for Debian, Updates are plenty and the packages much newer than in the stable, though not bleeding edge.
Best of both worlds IMHO
No, so far no bugs worth mentioning. All works well, apart from more incoming updates than usually on a Debian System.
The problems I ran into were mostly with GNOME and Hotkeys for Apps in Wayland. Like Shift + F12 to open a Terminal does not work reliably when set in the Terminal app, but works well when set in the Gnome Settings as a global Shortcut. But I would file that under annoyance rather then a serious bug.
To add to this: Debian is pretty conservative in regards to package versions. The current and LTS versions usually have slightly older packages.
If you don’t mind tackling more updates, I suggest Debian Testing. That is the stable development branch for the next major release, currently rocking it with Wayland GNOME on my DELL notebook and very happy with the results.
Basically a pair of bouncers at the door to your Home Network whose specific purpose is to manage the flow of guests from outside (the internet) to your club (media server with library).