Barebones gnome has been great for me. One time I did the "full" install by accident and yea it came with a bunch of bullshit games and stuff, but otherwise it's been the most stable out of all of them.

Unity or whatever Ubuntu ships with did not like working from an install on neither my macbook pro nor my thinkpad, and it really didn't like my 4k monitor. KDE didn't like switching between 4k and my laptop screen.