Debian is stable.... you're not going to get anything but security updates and bug fixes. If you need new features, install backports, move to Siduction based on unstable Sid or stick with Ubuntu.
Ok, that's what I thought, however, I guess I was expecting at least a few bug fixes and/or a security update in the first 10 days... Maybe not though. I'll have to check my sources.list file next time I restore the image and make sure it's good. That's all I can think of. Meanwhile, I'm on Mint Cinnamon 18.2 right now...
They'll come out very infrequently.... like weeks or even months. Debian is to the deb. world what RHEL/CENTOS is to the rpm. world. A stable and dependable long term OS. A new version appears roughly every two years. If you want bleeding edge, there's Siduction which is a rolling release and with Ubuntu, you can upgrade roughly every six months - between LTS releases.
For what it's worth department, I restored my Debian 9 Gnome image 5 days later and now everything is updating and working great, there were a dozen or so packages updated today. So it's back to Debian for me...
In a stricter sense, if we consider a pure UEFI boot with secure boot enabled, the popular Arch/Manjaro distros still do not support UEFI with secure boot. It's truly a pity, as they still view secure boot as a Microsoft monopoly effort rather than something that does provide some computer security.
Reporting back. I just installed using a Deb 9.3 (third iteration) net install cd. It is a bare metal machine running Stretch Cinnamon. Complete rebuild not an upgrade. The install went pretty smoothly with one glaring exception. There is a known bug in the installer regarding the handling of sudo/su/sudoers. If you set a root password during install and then later during the install you set a user and password it will NOT work out of the box when you mount the system. Many, many folks have seen this, while some don't. I assembled a few quick steps to remedy this issue and once learned its an easy fix. The terminal commands to set various items of interest have been changed, which I guess is to be expected when you go to a new version. e.g. setting autologin of the user, setting the sudoer file for that user to universal access with sudo password. Its all easy stuff just a small learning curve. So far I have been loving Stretch and if my love for this continues another week I'll be moving all my Jessie machines to Stretch. Nice graphics and very smooth. Install went well on my VM's before going bare metal.
