You can install multiple kernels along with their respective headers. As long as you create a hook that runs mkinitcpio and grub-mkconfig whenever you update the kernels, you can then choose which kernel you want to use when the grub menu comes up.

This way you can always use whichever kernel you want, and is good practice should an update to one of the kernels have breaking changes.

If you want stability use the latest Debian. The point of those LTS kernels is more and more supporting IoT and other devices you can’t simply upgrade, but you want to keep secure… regular use cases can just usa a stable disto like Debian and you’ll never notice any kernel related issues.

LTS kernels aren’t more or less stable. Rather, they have been selected by the kernel maintainers to get security fixes backported to them for a certain time.

Ubuntu does the same thing for the kernels on their LTS versions (technically they usually are not LTS kernels since canonical supports them instead of kernel team)

Overall I’d suggest going with what the distro provides unless you have very new hardware, in which case a newer kernel may be required

Do you need those features? If not, go LTS. LTS means you’ll have to update the distro less frequently than latest.

If you want those features, go non-LTS, there’s no other choice. If you don’t want them, go LTS, it’s less of a hassle.

It depends on your priorities, hardware, use cases etc. Honestly it’s unlikely to be the determining factor. Available hardware and software support and your attitude to risk are probably more important. Fedora is a cutting edge distro with good reliability and is feature rich. It’s upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux so has massive support behind it and a large user base. There are multiple spins if you want GNOME or KDE or an immutable OS etc. Adding additional repos such as RPMfusion make adding Nvidia and other proprietary drivers a breeze. As with most things GNU/Linux you need to be prepared to put in the effort to take control of your digital life. It’s not easy but well worth it.

I have an LTS kernel as a backup in case something doesn’t work with my main kernel.

Just recently I had an issue where my main kernel had a bug where snap’s can’t start up, so I just restarted into the LTS kernel to use it then restarted back into my main kernel.