For me it’s MATE.

For some reason I’ve never really gotten on with XFCE. Tried it in earnest many years ago, and have dipped into it a few more times over the years, and for whatever reason it just doesn’t gel with me. Always feels like I’m fighting it to get it to do what I want it to do.

MATE has the familiarity and comfort for anyone who spent serious years running GNOME 2. It’s pretty much as lightweight as XFCE these days, but feels more polished and intuitive for it.

Ubuntu MATE is still one of my go-to distros for limited hardware (even though that project specifically seems to have stagnated somewhat in recent years).

BSD is BSD-like

It certainly is that, yes.

BSD is more UNIX than Linux is, to be fair.

A regular reminder that ChromeOS is Linux. It’s Linux you can buy from a bricks and mortar store, preconfigured for the average low-knowledge user, and with minimal to no maintenance overhead.

We enthusiasts obviously mostly hate it, but we’re not its target audience. Its target audience (non-techies who mostly just like to use their phones) get on great with it.

People need to accept that any Linux distro made for mass market is going to look more or less like ChromeOS. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as traditional distros also continue to exist. But people need to get out of their heads that the “year of Linux on the desktop” looks like Ubuntu or Fedora or Mint. What it looks like is ChromeOS.