I don't care about the default DE that much as I run my own minimal setup, it's more about freshness of packages/kernels and stability for me.

Unbunu provides a nice middle ground between the very stable but very stale Debian (stable) and the and the bleeding edge of something like Arch. Ubuntu does nice stuff like releasing newer kernels for LTS releases but the NIH annoyances have grated on me for the last few years (Mir, Upstart, Snap etc...).