>>22 >>23 yeah the only really relevant things are that debian based distros can run .deb applications, and arch has the AUR. the first is useful if you want to run the most programs, the second is useful if you want to run generally high quality software, either case makes concessions. the other aspects of the package managers are somewhat irrelevant as long as you're using distro that has a well maintained repository. systemd by itself isn't really going to affect your use cases a lot, it's just easier to find documentation for distros that use systemd. the practical difference is gonna be what software you end up using on your machine, and you can customize that with any distro.
afaik the only things that make distro's different are the package managers and whether or not it uses systemd