I wholeheartedly agree. What I really want is a super conservative LTS system that keeps the core - OS, window manager, file manager, network, etc - on super stable and old versions, and my apps - Firefox, Emacs, Spotify, ... - updated to the latest release. I'm tired of "new" desktop environments, and rewrites that means I'll now have to live with years of bug fixing until I get a stable system.
I'm hoping that Ubuntu slowly becomes this, especially with the move to the very stable Gnome 3.
I should add that I also want to use the most standardized desktop environment I can find. Which these days seems to be Win10, macOS, Ubuntu, and maybe a KDE based one?
I'm hoping that Ubuntu slowly becomes this, especially with the move to the very stable Gnome 3.