Xubuntu is my distro of choice, for those reasons. One cannot understate the usefulness of the Ubuntu base; it makes the whole ecosystem that much more useful and maintainable. I even use it on newer machines, just for the speed. I switched to Mint for a while, but when I tried Xubuntu again, they were using wisker-menu by default. So I mapped the windows key to it, so I could press it and start typing names of programs, just like Windows (a UI feature they nailed).