Unfortunately, I don't have great insight on those two, since I keep my laptop setup pretty simple.

I don't really mess with the init system very much, so I can't really weigh in on that. I've probably only run "sudo service start " a few times, so aside from the CLI being a little different from systemd, I haven't noticed a difference. There would probably be another learning curve if you're looking to actually create system services, but I never end up doing that on my laptop.

I haven't had any issues with the packages, but that's probably because I use the Flatpak if it's available. So yes, the debian repo wouldn't be current, but all of the daily things I use (browser, Thunderbird, Steam, text editor) get updates from the Flathub repo. The built-in MX package manager has a section for Flathub, so you don't have to add anything for that.