I was using elementaryos because it looked nice and had a debian base for stability but I don't like the direction it is going so I am looking for something that is a little out of my comfort zone but not as crazy as arch. Bonus points if it supports KDE.
I just switched to Debian after having enough of Canonical. There is hardly any UI difference, if anything Debian actually works better in every regard for me.
You can select any DE to use during the install process. Gnome, kde, xfce, etc