I loved Ubuntu around 2007-2009 or so. Nowdays it feels like there are plenty of alternative distros that "just work" without so many of the idiosyncratic stuff canonical keeps dumping into what used to be "debian for the masses"
> As Linux evangelist Mark Pilgrim once quipped, Ubuntu "is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'".
If anything, Cannonical is aligning with mainstream in recent years: upstart -> systemd, unity -> gnome, mir -> wayland
New things that are Canonical specific are netplan and snap. I think snap is solving software packaging in Linux. If anything, I wish that snap brand stores were more affordable.
Use flatpack
Use AppImage + firejail (optionally, to fully sandbox AppImage)
I want to like AppImage, but it is just unreasonable that there is no built-in way to trivially install a .desktop file for a given AppImage I've downloaded.
Here it is.[0,1]
[0] https://github.com/TheAssassin/AppImageLauncher
[1] https://docs.appimage.org/reference/desktop-integration.html