Canonical’s announced a major shift in its kernel selection process for future Ubuntu releases. An “aggressive kernel version commitment policy” pivot will see it ship the latest upstream kernel code in development at the time of a new Ubuntu release.
Original announcement: Kernel Version Selection for Ubuntu Releases
In my (admitted probably slightly dated) experience KDE kinda is like that. It’s super loaded with bells and whistles, but then because it has so many bells and whistles it’s really clear when something doesn’t work right. Personally I really like XFCE for having a decent amount of customization while being very stable and very resource light, but it does look like development has become very slow on XFCE (and afaik it doesn’t yet have any Wayland support which might be a nail in the coffin moving forwards) but cinnamon is also very nice for similar reasons
I will try out Debian, which uses Wayland by default. So hopefully I will get what I need for my DE.
Otherwise, if nothing works for me, I always go back to Ubuntu if I really don’t like Debian.
Distro hopping truly is a way of life!