The great thing about Debian is; it has a gear-shifter.
Whether stable or sid, it’s still debian but you can go from “rock solid, reliable” to “most recent with several updates per day” in the same ecosystem and just by changing the repositories, apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, done.
Try Debian sid (unstable), from my experience it’s actually more stable than testing because it gets updates even more often.
And ditch Gnome. There is no way to be happy with it as it craps out very often and is a maintenance burden for maintainers, therefore the quality differs so much.